Faculty

The Summer School will be directed by Lorenz Engell (Weimar, Media Philosophy) and Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton, German/Program in Media+Modernity).

The faculty will include:

Gleb Albert and Monika Dommann (Zürich, History; DFG Research Group Media and Mimesis)
Eva von Engelberg (Weimar, Architectural History; DFG Research Group Media and Mimesis)
Stephan Gregory (Weimar, Media of Historiography; DFG Research Group Media and Mimesis)
Mark Hansen (Durham, Media Studies)
Michael W. Jennings (Princeton, German)
Shannon Mattern (New York, Media Studies)
Lynn Spigel (Evanston, Screen Cultures)

Gleb J. Albert

is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich as part of the research group “Media and Mimesis”. For a number of years, he had worked as a research assistant in a project on the Communist International and Soviet foreign policy, exploring former Soviet and GDR archives and mapping their accessibility after the “Archival Revolution” of the early 1990s. Further extended archival explorations were conducted by him for his PhD thesis, "The Charisma of World Revolution: Revolutionary Internationalism in Early Soviet Society, 1917-1927", which he defended at Bielefeld University in 2014. Currently he is working on a postdoc project about 1980s home computer subcultures, dealing with sources of a different kind – digital artefacts from the dawn of network society. He is co-editor of the “International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online” and the “Demoscene Research” blog. Among his recent publications are: ‘To help the Republicans not just by donations and rallies, but with the rifle’: Militant Solidarity with the Spanish Republic in the Soviet Union, 1936–1937, in: European Review of History 2014/4, 501-518; ‘German October is Approaching’. Internationalism, Activists, and the Soviet State in 1923, in: Revolutionary Russia 2011/2, 111-142.

Monika Dommann

holds a Chair for Modern History at the University of Zurich. Previously she has taught at the University of Basel and has held research positions at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophthe (IKKM) in Weimar, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the McGill University in Montreal and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna. Her main areas of research include the relations between the old and the new world, the history of material cultures, the history of intellectual properties, the history of logistics, the history of the market and its margins, the history of images and sound as well as methodology and theory of history.

Eva von Engelberg

studied art history, archeology and German literature at the universities in Munich and Bonn. After a research stay at the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut in Rotterdam she finished her dissertation about the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud in 2001 and worked for several years in the field of cultural heritage. 2005-13 she was research associate at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (later HafenCity University) and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2008 she undertook a research stay as awardee of the “Theodor-Fischer-Preis” at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In 2013 she received a postdoc-scholarship. Research and publications in the field of cultural heritage and architectural history from the 18th century till today. Her current research projects are historicizing forms in architecture after postmodernism and the Danish classicism in the duchies Schleswig and Holstein.

Lorenz Engell

born 1959 in Düsseldorf, Germany; 1977–1982 Study of theatre, film and television studies, Romance languages and Literature and art history at the University of Cologne; M.A. 1985–1993 Research assistant at the Institute of theatre, film and television studies, University of Cologne; 1988 Ph. D.; 1990/91 Substitute Professor for film and television studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum; 1993 Habilitation Professor for Wahrnehmungslehre, History and Theory of Communication and Media, Faculty of Design, Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen, Weimar (today: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar); 1996–2000 founding dean of the Faculty of Media of the Bauhaus University Weimar; 2001 Professor for Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus University Weimar. 2004–2008 Vice President for Teaching of the Bauhaus University Weimar. since 2008 Director (together with Berhard Siegert) of the IKKM.since 2012 Honorary Senator at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen München.2013/14 Visiting Professor at the Université Paris 2.

Stephan Gregory

studied medicine in Marburg and Berlin, philosophy and German literature at the Universities of Munich and Vienna. From 1998 to 2004 he worked as a lecturer of Media Theory and Cultural Studies at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. From 2004 to 2010 he was a scientific coordinator of the graduate program “Historiography of Media / Media of Historiography” at the universities of Weimar, Erfurt and Jena. In 2007 he received his PhD with a thesis on the epistemological policies of 18th century's secret societies. Since 2010 he is an assistant professor at the Media Department of Bauhaus University, Weimar. In the summer term of 2013 he has been a senior fellow at the "Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg" of the University of Konstanz. He is conducting the research project “Mimesis Tropical” within the DFG research team "Medien und Mimesis", based in Weimar.

Mark B.N. Hansen

is Professor of Literature and Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University. Having studied Comparative and French Literature at New York University and the University of California, Hansen held a Fulbright Full Scholarship at the University of Konstanz, Germany in 1990 and 1991. In 1994, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California. Hansen worked as Assistant Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University (1994-1997) and at Princeton University (1997-2004). From 2005 to 2008, Hansen was Professor of English, Visual Arts and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
Hansen’s publications include Feed Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2014. Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. Mark B. N. Hansen and W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010; Emergence and Embodiment. New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, eds. Mark B.N. Hansen and Bruce Clarke, Durham: Duke University Press 2009.

Michael Jennings

focuses his teaching and research on European culture in the twentieth century. In addition to literature, he teaches on topics in cultural theory and the visual arts, with special emphasis on photography. He approaches cultural material from a perspective informed by historicist interpretive strategies and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Jennings is an Associated Faculty Member of the Department of Art and Archaeology and the School of Architecture and a Faculty Associate of the Center for the Study of Religion. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Ph.D. Program in Humanistic Studies.
He is the author of two books on Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1987) and, with Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard University Press, forthcoming in 2013). He also serves as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin’s works, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Harvard University Press, four volumes, 1996ff.) and the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin’s essays intended for classroom use, including The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2007); with Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (2008) ; and One Way Street (forthcoming in 2015).
His published work includes articles on the theory of art history (Alois Riegl, Wihelm Worringer), modernism in its relationship to capitalist modernity (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson), Weimar culture (Berlin Dada, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, forms of literary criticism), eighteenth-century aesthetics (Sturm und Drang, J.M.R. Lenz, Friedrich Hölderlin), modern media (print culture and modernism), and German photography (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Michael Schmidt). He is the editor, with Detlef Mertins, of a facsimile edition of the avantgarde journal G: Journal of Elemental Form-Creation, (Gerry Research Institute, 2010); with Uwe Steiner, of a volume of essays on Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage (forthcoming from Wilhelm Fink Verlag); with Tobias Wilke, of a special issue of Grey Room on Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Media; and with Stanley Corngold, of a special issue of Monatshefte on Kafka's Late Style.
He is currently at work on two book projects: a critical biography of Bertolt Brecht and a study of the German photo-essay in the twentieth century.
Jennings serves as Director of the Alexander Kluge Research Collection at Princeton University and the Co-Director, with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, of the Oxford-Princeton Research Collaboration in German. He serves as co-chair of the Executive Committee of the International Walter Benjamin Society and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Uwe Johnson Association. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World; links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca; and Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy and Culture.
After serving as Master of Rockefeller College from 1990-1999 and as Chair of the Department of German from 1999-2012, Jennings served as co-chair of the steering committee for Princeton University's decennial accreditation process.

Thomas Y. Levin

joined the faculty at Princeton in 1990 following graduate study in art history and philosophy at Yale University and after a year in Los Angeles as a fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. His teaching and scholarship range from the history of aesthetic theory and Frankfurt School cultural theory to the history and theory of media (archaeologies of vision, Early German Cinema, Weimar Cinema, New German Cinema, rhetoric of new media, rhetorics of surveillance). His work on questions of aesthetics, technology, and sound grew out of his research on metronomes, gramophones, and the prehistory of acoustic inscription, as well as his activities as associate editor of The Musical Quarterly (where he was for many years responsible for the section Institutions, Industries, and Technologies of Music). A former fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) and at the Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study (Budapest), in 1999 Levin was chosen by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to be "curator-in-residence" at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where he developed a project entitled "Celluloid Rembrandtiana" that investigated the dynamics of cultural nationalism and mass media through a program of over a dozen films on Rembrandt (1920 to 1999) which was subsequently shown at the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt/Main, at the Arsenal Kino in Berlin, and in 2005 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. During the academic year 2000-01, which he spent in Germany as the academic director of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies at the FU-Berlin, Levin completed a study of the origins of synthetic sound in the late 1920s, and an analysis of some theoretical issues posed by the advent of digital imaging. He also curated a major international exhibition entitled "CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother" which was on view at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe through late February 2002. Besides a number of further publication and curatorial projects related to his research on the aesthetic politics of surveillance --including "Anxious Omniscience" at the Princeton University Art Musuem and "9/11 + 1: The Perplexities of Security" at Brown University's Watson Center-- Levin is also working on two small books, one growing out of his Rembrandt Media project and the other on the film-theoretical cinema of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.
Levin spent the academic year 2004-2005 on sabbatical leave as a senior scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In November 2005 he organized a one-day conference at the Louvre Museum in Paris entitled "Photographie, Prison, Pouvoir: Politiques de l'Image Carcérale" which re-examined the history of what Levin calls the "carceral image" in the wake of Abou Ghraib. More recently, Levin curated a small show (drawn from his collection of the work of the Situationist International) entitled "'The Arts of the Future will be radical transformations of situations, or they will be nothing': Guy Debord Cineaste" at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.
Most recently Levin spent the academic year 2011-2012 as Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar where he was working on a study of digital video compression algorithm hacking. Winner of the Einstein Prize, Levin has also been an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin since November 2010, where he is directing an ongoing research project on the archaeology of voice mail.

Shannon Mattern

is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research and teaching address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces (architectural, urban, conceptual) they create and inhabit. She writes about libraries and archives, media companies' headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. She's the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (2007) and Deep Mapping the Media City (2015), both published by the University of Minnesota Press; and she’s a columnist for Places, a journal covering architecture, landscape, and urbanism. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Lynn Spigel

is a widely acclaimed media and television scholar and Frances E. Willard Pro-fessor of Screen Cultures at the School of Communication at Northwestern University. In 1988, Spigel received her Ph.D. in the Motion Picture/Television Division at University of California, Los Angeles, with a dissertation entitled “Installing the Television Set: The Social Construction of Television’s Place in the American Home, 1948-55”. From 1987 to 1991, she worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1991, Spigel took a position as Associate Professor at University of Southern California, before being appointed Professor in 1997. Spigel transferred to North-western University in 2002. Since 1994, she has been the book series editor for the Console-ing Passion book series at Duke University Press. Furthermore, Spigel is a member of the editorial board of, among oth-ers, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies as well as the Journal of Games and Culture. Since 2008, she has been an advisory board member of the UCLA Film and Television Archives. Spigel has received the John Simon Guggenheim Me-morial Foundation Fellowship in 2012 as well as the Mellon Lectureship Fellowship, awarded by the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2009. To name but a few, Spigel has given lec-tures at venues such as Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2), Universiteit van Amsterdam, Stockholm University, Harvard University or Princeton University.