Yasmin Afshar
has been a PhD-candidate and assistant professor in American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt since October 2014. Her research interests include modern and postmodern American literature, literary theory, film studies, and media philosophy. She received her master’s degree in German and American Studies in summer 2014, her thesis fusing approaches from urban and literary studies with a Deleuzian space philosophy in a reading of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace and Teju Cole’s Open City. Her dissertation project “Liquid Film-Philosophies: Thinking the Materiality of Time and Ruination with Contemporary American Experimental Cinema” focuses on the interrelations between film, philosophy and liquidity. American avant-garde cinema has frequently drawn to water as a means to reflect on the ontology of the moving image, while recently many film-makers direct attention to the very material life of the celluloid strip and its emulsion. Investigating the potential of film for becoming active in philosophizing on its own, her project takes into account the eco-spatio-temporal dimension of these late experiments in order for a larger perspective on film in the digital age.
Megan Barford
is a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her work is concerned with the writing and record keeping practices which developed around the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty, which was responsible for the production of sea charts and other navigational aids, in the earlier nineteenth century. This research involves attention to paperwork on the part of these historical actors which ranged from concerns about the materiality of paper to worries about epistolary style in a highly formalised correspondence network. It involves work with a range of sources, including both official and personal archives as well as extensive museum collections of navigational instruments once owned and managed by the Office.
Amanda Beardsley
is a PhD student in Art History at Binghamton University. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Utah, where she focused on site-specific performance art. Her dissertation, titled “Celestial Mechanics: Technologies of Salvation in American Religion,” addresses the intersection between technology and religious cosmology by looking to 19th and 20th century visual and aural innovation within Mormonism. She has served as President of the Art History Graduate Student Union and is a member of the Material and Visual Worlds steering committee and working group.
Fabienne Chamelot
is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. Her research explores French colonial archives in the 20th century, focusing specifically on the management and organisation of colonial archives in Indochina and French West Africa under colonial rule, as well as in metropolitan France. By mapping out the organisation of French colonial administration, she seeks to locate the ruling power within this organisation and to unfold its different layers. Ultimately, her research will approach the concept of ‘empire’ beyond the binary dichotomy of centre and periphery. Fabienne has an MA in Social Sciences from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, and has completed one year as a visiting student at New York University. Before starting her PhD, she worked in the non-fiction publishing field in France, mostly at Gallimard and as a freelance editor.
Frances Cullen
is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies and a specialist in the theory and historiography of photography, cinema, and media. Her research areas include the cultural and institutional histories of media and media discourse; media archaeology; media art history; and critical theories of time, history, materiality, and obsolescence. In her dissertation, Analogue Afterlives, she will critically examine the persisting fascination with analogue photographies in practice, theory, and the cultural imaginary in the digital age.
Prior to joining the department at McGill, she developed these research areas by studying art history at the University of Alberta; the material history of photography at Ryerson University; and cinema studies at the University of Toronto. She has also worked with photography and film collections, most notably during two years spent as a student and staff member at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.
Over the course of her doctoral studies she has been the recipient of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship and multiple awards from Media@McGill. She has presented her work in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Daniel D’Amore
is a third year PhD candidate in the Film & Visual Studies program at Harvard University. Previously, he attended Oberlin College, graduating with High Honors in 2009, followed by a brief parenthesis as a freelance videographer and editor. Much of his research draws on theories and philosophies of media, mediality, and space to interrogate topics such as the effects and legacies of pollution, cybernetics, and the weird in post-modern architecture, experimental and educational film, and visual culture at large. Future work will (possibly) take the Astrodome as its primary focus.
Michael Faciejew
is a doctoral student in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Upon obtaining his M.Arch from McGill University in 2011, he was awarded a research residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and co-developed a project on the theme of Health/City. His work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education and he is currently an editor at Pidgin Magazine. He has practiced as an architectural designer in Los Angeles, New York, and New Haven.
Faciejew’s research on European modern architecture focuses on questions concerning epistemology, rationalization, language, and technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Johan Fredrikzon
is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at the University of Stockholm. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a M.A. in the History of Ideas. His dissertation subject is the aspect of information erasure in twentieth century media systems such as national archives and word processors, adopting a view of erasure practices as inherent to the production of data rather than mere security threats or waste management issues. His research interests include the philosophy of artificial intelligence, archival theory, digital ontology, the history of technological determinism, the aesthetics of decay and the psychology of information overload.
Fabian Grütter
received an MA degree in History and Philosophy of Knowledge from ETH Zurich in 2013. He also holds a BA degree in English Literature and English Linguistics as well as in Modern History (University of Zurich). His dissertation project is concerned with commercial graphic design, advertising psychology and the organizational sciences between 1910 and 1940 in Switzerland. Grütter investigates how knowledge about visual perception and the organization of paper-based information influenced the form and format of stationery and, concomitantly, how artifacts produced by graphic designers participated in generating said knowledge. Thus, he aims at writing a history of knowledge circulation between the poles of psychology, graphic design and the organizational sciences. In doing so, he explores contexts of modernist graphic design far removed from modernist art.
Ella Klik
is a PhD candidate in the department of Media, Culture and Communication and Culture at New York University. She is currently working on a dissertation on the topic of erasure at the intersection of media history and philosophy. Surveying the underexplored histories of several tools, techniques and gestures involved in the work of erasing, the project will rethink the relation between inscription and its negation. Past projects focused on Holocaust memory, cinema and horror, and Viennese Actionism. Ella's current research interests include media archaeology, media theory and continental philosophy. She also holds a BA in English Linguistics and Communication & Journalism and an MA in Communication & Journalism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Elisa Linseisen
born 1987 in Munich, is Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Media Studies of the Ruhr-University Bochum since October 2014. Having studied German Literature and Media at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich from 2008, she graduated in 2013 with the master thesis about a media philosophical approach on 3D movies (published in 2014 as “3D. Filmisches Denken einer Unmöglichkeit”). In 2014 she was a Lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilians- University. Since 2014 she is writing on her Ph.D. thesis about an aesthetic theory of and media philosophical focus on High Definition under the professorship of Oliver Fahle. Elisa Linseisen is a Fellow of Hanns-Seidel-Foundation since 2010 and holds a doctoral scholarship since 2014. Her fields of research include digital visuality of the moving picture, film- and media philosophy and image theory.
Alessandra Luciano
After graduating with a Master’s degree in Film Studies from Columbia University, Alessandra graduated from the University of Amsterdam in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image in 2014. While completing her thesis “The Archive from Database to Interface”, Alessandra started working as the head of the film and television archives in Luxembourg. She works to make the past and future archives accessible to the public. Additionally, she takes a hands-on approach to ensure long-term access to the digital archive by keeping up with and implementing best practices and repairing and cataloguing film prints. Her interest in physical artifacts is complemented with a political interest in audiovisual heritage. Alessandra is the Luxembourgish representative of the European Commission’s Film Heritage Subgroup and consults on a national level on audiovisual policy. Alessandra’s research pertains to the analysis of our networked society and its power structures and what technological changes signify in how heritage is communicated and preserved.
Anton Pluschke
studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Humboldt and Free University in Berlin, at the Berlin Institute of Technology and at the Université de Lausanne. He received his M.A. degree at Peter Szondi Institute with a thesis on the power of Oblivion in the works of Martin Heidegger, Elena Esposito and Friedrich Kittler. In 2011 Anton organized a conference to commemorate and rethink the legacy of Daniel Paul Schreber. He gave conference talks at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the German National Academic Foundation and the Annual Conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His research interests include the classical foundations of Modern Literature in Antiquity, Deconstruction, System’s Theory, the Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Law and Literature and Media Theory. Anton is particularly interested in the form of Justice that can be provided by literary operations vis à vis the legal and philosophical tradition.
Federica Soletta
is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture and a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the writing of architectural history in mid-nineteenth century and especially on the impact that early photography and natural science had on its development. Before moving to Princeton she received a M.Arch. from the Politecnico di Milano and a MS in Critical and Curatorial Practice in Architecture from Columbia University.
Stacy Wood
is a PhD student at UCLA in Information Studies. She also holds a Master's in Library and Information Studies with a specialization in Archival Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in Literature, Media and Gender Studies from Pitzer College. Her dissertation research focuses on the historical, legal and theoretical foundations of classified information as well as its epistemologies, material and artifactual features. She is also interested in information cultures of intelligence communities, media histories of spy technologies and archival histories. She is currently the Lead Information Studies Editor for InterActions the UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies and has been working in community and cultural archives throughout Los Angeles since 2010.