College of Arts and Sciences

Education:

• PhD, Anthropology, University of California at Los Angeles, 2009

Research Interests:

• Visual Anthropology
• Digital technologies and mediated cities
• Photography and the urban imagination
• Street photography, street fashion, and street style blogging
• DIY, amateur, and independent media
• New Media and Mediated subjectivities
• United States and Southeast Asia

Bio:

Brent Luvaas is a visual and socio-cultural anthropologist interested in digital technologies and their impacts on creative practice and everyday urban experience. He is the author of Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging (Bloomsbury 2016) and DIY Style: Fashion, Music, and Global Digital Culture (Berg 2012), and co-editor of The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion: A Reader. He has received several prominent fellowships, including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program Grant, and the American Institute for Indonesian Studies Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship, and has published in journals including Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography, Fashion Theory, and Visual Anthropology Review. Visit his personal website and see his visual work at brentluvaas.com.

Selected Publications:

• The Anthropology of Dress and Fasion: A Reader (editor, with Joanne Eicher) London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
• Street Style Geographies: Re-Mapping the Fashion Blogipelago, in International Journal of Fashion Studies 5(2): 289-308, 2018.
• Post No Bill: The Transience of New York City Street Style, in Fashion Studies 1(1): 1-20, 2018.
• Unbecoming: The Aftereffects of Autoethnography, in Ethnography, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1466138117742674?ai=1gvoi&=3ricys&af=R, 2017.
• The Affective Lens, in Anthropology & Humanism 42(2): 163-179, 2017.
• What Does a Fashion Influencer Look Like? Portraits of the Instafamous, in Fashion, Style, and Popular Culture 4(3): 341-364, 2017.
• Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
• Internet Famous in Real Life: Becoming a Street Style Star at New York Fashion Week, in Cultural Anthropology 31(2) online edition, 2016.
• Indonesian Fashion Blogs: On the Promotional Subject of Personal Style, in Fashion Theory, 17(1): 55-76, 2013.
• Shooting Street Style in Indonesia: A Photo Essay, in Clothing Cultures 1(1): 59-81, 2013.
• Material Interventions: Indonesian DIY Fashion and the Regime of the Global Brand, in Cultural Anthropology 28(1): 127-143, 2013.
• Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: Performing Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music, in Asian Music 44(2): 95-114, 2013.
• Third World No More: Re-Branding Indonesian Streetwear, in Fashion Practice 5(2): 203-228, 2013.
• DIY Style: Fashion, Music, and Global Digital Cultures, London and New York: Berg, 2012.
• Designer Vandalism: Indonesian Indie Fashion and the Cultural Practice of Cut ’n’ Paste in Visual Anthropology Review 26(1): 1-16, 2010.
• Dislocating Sounds: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop, in Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 246-279, 2009.
• Re-Producing Pop: The Ambivalent Aesthetics of a Contemporary Dance Music, in International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(2): 167-187, 2006.