© photo by Jeff Day

Nadja Millner-Larsen

Nadja Millner-Larsen

Doctoral Student Fellow

Doctoral Student, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Up Against the Real: Anti-representational Militancy in 1960s New York

Nadja Millner-Larsen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Nadja holds a BA in History and Human Rights from Bard College and her broad interests include visual culture, affect studies, theories of temporality, “postanarchism” and critical historiography. Nadja’s dissertation-Up Against the Real: Anti-representational Militancy in 1960s New York – examines groups of the New Left era that operated at the intersection of 1960s aesthetic and political avant-gardes. Focusing on groups (mostly anarchist) who ultimately rejected the art world in favor of a militant engagement with “the real,” Nadja argues that the negotiations between politics and form entailed by aesthetic experimentalism were constitutive of a wider critique of representational logic fundamental to many on the militant side of the New Left. The dissertation also considers the ways in which the renewed availability of this history in the present illuminates a contemporary desire to articulate a politics beyond mediation.