Faculty

The Summer School will be directed by Lorenz Engell (Weimar) and Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton).

The faculty will include:

Jane Bennett (Baltimore, Political Science)
Elisabeth Bronfen (Zürich, English and American Studies)
Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, History and Theory of Architecture)
Brian Massumi (Montreal, Communication)
Erin Manning (Montreal, Relational Art and Philosophy)
Claus Pias (Lüneburg, History and Epistemology of Media)
Avital Ronell (New York, Humanities)
Bernhard Siegert (Weimar, Theory and History of Cultural Techniques)
Christiane Voss (Weimar, Audiovisual Media and Media Philosophy)
Mark Wigley (New York, Architecture)

Jane Bennett

is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She is one of the founders of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently the editor of Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy. Professor Bennett specializes in political theory: ecological philosophy, American political thought, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social theory. She has been a Fellow at Oxford University (Keble College), Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London), and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University. Her fields of research include political theory, eco-philosophy, and American political thought.

Elisabeth Bronfen

is professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zürich and has been, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She gained her B.A. at Radcliffe College and her M.A. at Harvard University. She completed her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson's novel Pilgrimage, and her habilitation, five years later, on representations of femininity and death. Elisabeth Bronfen was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University (1987-88), a Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University (1997, 2000), a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow of the council of the Humanities at Princeton (1995), a S.W. Brooks Visiting Lecturer at the University of Queensland (2003), and had a residency at the Louise Bourgeois Studio (2010). She has been a visiting professor at Sheffield Hallam University, University of Odense, University of Copenhagen, Catholic University in Lisbon. Since 2012 she has been a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2017 she was awarded the Martin Warnke-Medal by the Aby-Warburg Stiftung. Her fields of research encompass British and American Studies from the 19th through the early 21st century, the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare and early modern drama in opera, cinema and TV as well as literary and culture theory, visual culture and intermediality, gender studies, and psychoanalysis.

Beatriz Colomina

is Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture and founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller, 2016), The Century of the Bed (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2015), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg, 2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (Actar, 2010), Domesticity at War (MIT Press, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), and Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012) and Radical Pedagogies (2014). She was curator with Mark Wigley of the third Istanbul Design Biennial (2016).

Brian Massumi

is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent books include Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke UP 2015), Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015), and The Power at the End of the Economy (Duke UP, 2014). He is co-author with Erin Manning of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Also with Erin Manning and the SenseLab collective, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction, most recently in the frame of the "Immediations: Art, Media, Event" international partnership project. His research focuses on the philosophy of experience, art and media philosophy as well as political philosophy.

Erin Manning

holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the SenseLab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to color and movement. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014) and The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016). She works across art, philosophy and activism. Manning’s artworks explore conditions of emergent collectivity, often working with textile as medium. Currently her practice explores the synesthesia of color-smell. Her next exhibition will take place at the Public Art Biennale of Tunis in October 2017. Manning’s writing explores the relations between movement, art, neurodiversity and the political through the lens of process philosophy. She is particularly interested in more-than human ecologies of practices and the minor gestures they make palpable.

Claus Pias

is Professor for the History and Epistemology of Media at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM), Director of the Institute for Advanced Study “Media Cultures of Computer Simulation” (mecs), the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), and the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany. He was a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) Weimar, the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) Vienna, the Institute for Advanced Study / Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz, and the Center for Advanced Study "BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics" at the Free University in Berlin. He is also a member of the Graduate Schools "Loose Connections: Collectivity at the intersection of digital and urban space" in Hamburg and "Cultures of Critique" in Lueneburg. Currently he is Visiting Professor at Princeton University. His main areas of interest are: media theory, history of science of ‚mediathinking‘, and history and epistemology of simulation and cybernetics. Publications a.o.: Computer Game Worlds, Chicago UP 2017; Ed. with I. Baxmann and T. Beyes: Social Media – New Masses, Zürich/Chicago 2016; Cybernetics. The Macy Conferences 1946-1953. The Complete Transactions, Chicago UP 2016.

Avital Ronell

is university Professor of the Humanities at NYU, AR taught an annual course with Jacques Derrida until 2004. Scholar, performance lecturer, philosopher of technology, non-canonic utterance and political theory, she is a practiced troublemaker. She has given a series of 9 performances at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, "Selon Avital," that kicked off with a presentation and discussion with Werner Herzog and included a dance performance with Judith Butler in addition to a theater piece featuring Ernst Jünger, Heidegger, Marguerite Duras, Goethe, et al, on the technologies of drugs ("On Narcocism"). She also wrote and performed a theatrical work for Hau3, "What was I Thinking? A Critical Allothanatography," dir. Sladja Bazan.Recent works include Fighting Theory, The UeberReader, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority. She currently directs "Poetics & Theory" institute at NYU and is Jacques Derrida Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Her research interests include Philosophy, literature, political theory, écriture feminine, addiction and trauma studies.

Bernhard Siegert

is Professor for Theory and History of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University Weimar. He studied German and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Judaic Studies and History at Freiburg University and received his PhD from the Ruhr University Bochum in 1991. After a position as research assistant at the chair for Aesthetics and Media History at the Humboldt-University Berlin Bernhard Siegert came to Weimar in 2001 where was one of the founders of the Graduate School "Mediale Historiographien" in 2004, and initiated the degree program "MediaArchitecture" (Master of Science) at the Bauhaus-University. In 2004/05, he was Senior Fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaft (IFK) in Vienna, and, in 2008 and 2011, Visiting Professor of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since April 2008 Bernhard Siegert is – alongside with Lorenz Engell – director oft the IKKM.

Christiane Voss

holds the chair for Philosophy of Audiovisual Media at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. She is director of the graduate school Kompetenzzentrum Medienanthropologie (KOMA), which she initiated in 2014. Together with Prof. Dr. Lorenz Engell she conducts the research project „Mimesis of the Moving Image“, that is part of the DFG Research Cluster „Media and Mimesis“. Her fields of research are: Media Anthropology, Media Philosophy, Aesthetics and Theory of Affect. In the emerging field of Media Anthropology Christiane Voss has made programmatic contributions. She developed her concept of Anthropomediality in two articles: „Auf dem Weg zu einer Medienphilosophie anthropomedialer Relationen“ (2010) („Towards a Media Philosophy of anthropomedial relations), and „From media anthropology to anthropomediality“ (together with Tim Othold) (2015). Furthermore Christiane Voss stimulated the debate in the field of Media Anthropology with conferences as: „Was wär der Mensch – anthropologische Projektionen“ (2012) (What would be human? – anthropological projections), „Black Box Leben“ (2013) (Black Box Life) und „Medienanthropologische Szenen“ (2016) (Scenes of Media Anthropology). The conference anthologies she edited together with Lorenz Engell present the outcomes and contours of this interdisciplinary and vivid debate. Christiane Voss' current research explores the mimetic and anthropomedial functions of the Diorama from the perspective of Media Anthropology and Media Philosophy.

Mark Wigley

is a Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is a historian and theorist who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His books include: Derrida’s Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction; White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture; Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire; and Buckminster Fuller Inc. - Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, The Drawing Center, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, and the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. In 2016 he co-curated the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial with Beatriz Colomina on the theme Are We Human? - The Design of the Species - 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 Years, 200,000 years. His most recent book, written with Beatriz Colomina, is Are We Human? - Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016).