Vita
Thomas Levin joined the faculty at Princeton in 1990 following graduate studies in art history and philosophy at Yale University and became a fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles, one year later. As an associate editor of The Musical Quarterly, he was responsible for the section on institutions, industries, and technologies of music for many years. As a former fellow of the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Budapest), Levin was chosen by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to be "artist-in-residence" at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 1999, where he developed a project entitled "Celluloid Rembrandtiana". Thomas Levin spent the academic year 2000/01 in Germany as the academic director of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies (BCGS, which was founded by University of Chicago, Columbia University and Barnard College, Cornell University, The Johns Hopkins University, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University) at FU Berlin. From 2004 to 2005 he was a senior scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Furthermore, Levin curated several exhibitions, e.g. at the Princeton University Art Musuem, at Brown University's Watson Center, at the ZKM Karlsruhe, and at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.
Dated from 2012
Fields of research
History of aesthetic theory and the Frankfurt School; the history and theory of media (archaeologies of vision, Early German Cinema, Weimar Cinema, New German Cinema, rhetoric of new media); theory of art history; questions of aesthetics, technology, and sound.
Publications
Resistance to Cinema: Reading German Film Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press (forthcoming).
with Michael W. Jennings and Brigid Doherty (eds.): Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2008.
"Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Hanecke's Caché". In: France Choinière (ed.): Fonction/Fiction: Utilitarian Images Reconfigured. Montreal: Les Éditions Dazibao, Centre de Photographies Actuelles/Edipresse 2008.
"Agencies of Vision: Remarks on Selected Works by Denis Beaubois". In: Russell Storer (ed.): Video Logic. Sidney: Museum of Contemporary Art 2008.
with Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (eds.): CTRL [Space]. Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2002.
" 'Töne aus dem Nichts': Rudolf Pfenninger und die Archäologie des synthetischen Tons." In Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho and Sigrid Weigel (eds.): Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2002, p. 313-355.
"Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Space and the Cinema of 'Real Time'." In: Big Brother: Architecture and Surveillance. Athens: National Museum of Contemporary Art 2002, p. 24-37.
Siegfried Kracauer: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. (translated, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin). Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1995.
with Michael Kessler (eds.): Siegfried Kracauer. Neue Interpretationen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag 1990.