Pyar Seth

Biography

Pyar Seth is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Working at the intersection of Black Studies, historical and medical anthropology, and postcolonial theory, much of his research focuses on the rationalization of state violence and the abstraction and distortion of Black life and death. As the Founding Director of the Studio-Lab HipHopRx, Pyar is also deeply engaged in experimental, cross-genre creative work.

He is the author of The Spectral Defect: Clinical Afterlives of State Violence(forthcoming, NYU Press), an intellectual and cultural history of medical diagnoses used to justify in-custody death. His second book, Markets for Souls: Necrofinance, Slavery, and the City of London (co-authored with Alexandre White) focuses on the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade, particularly how both underwriting and credit systematized human commodification. His next project is a critical examination of how Hip Hop became an object of study in neuroscience research. Some of his current and forthcoming scholarship can be found in Transforming Anthropology, Qualitative Inquiry, Southern Cultures, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, to name a few.

Before joining the department, Pyar was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame, a Visiting Research Scholar at King’s College London in the History of Medicine, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar. Pyar received his MA in Anthropology, his MA in Political Science, and his PhD in Anthropology and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, where he was also a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.