Muse Bio
Contact: jmuse@sonic.net
John Muse is an artist and writer living in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College. From 2007 to 2009 he served as the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Haverford’s Hurford Humanities Center. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn, co-chaired by Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman, analyzes Barthes’ numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, “TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Muse shows how these works use photographs to promulgate a crisis of the evident.
