Nina Sylvanus

Nina Sylvanus is a political-economic and cultural anthropologist whose research examines the intersections of capital and labor, value and aesthetics, infrastructure and technology, and, more broadly, the critical transformations of the contemporary global economy. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research in West Africa and increasingly comparative in scope, her work traces how material practices reshape economies, infrastructures, and forms of expertise across global settings. Sylvanus is the author of Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of the dense materiality and rich signifying qualities of African print cloth that argues for cloth as a powerful theoretical and methodological lens for understanding colonial and postcolonial regimes of value production, exchange, and social life. She is currently at work on Harboring the Future: Dis/continuities in the Telos of Automation, a manuscript on the long-term trajectory of port automation across West Africa, Europe, and China. It examines how embodied labor and technical expertise continue to shape automation, even as automation transforms the nature, locations, and politics of human work. She is also developing Restitution Unbound: From Diplomatic Politesse to Digital Heist, which explores emerging practices surrounding the restitution of looted cultural objects that move beyond diplomacy and museum procedure into the domains of hacking, gaming, and digital infrastructures. It examines how artists, activists, and museum professionals are reimagining restitution through video games, meme culture, digital acts of reappropriation, and collaborative platforms such as Digital Benin. These interventions open up new ways of thinking about ownership, repair, and the futures of colonial museum collections.