I am the Max Kade Foundation Chair of German Studies and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where I also direct the joint-Ph.D. program in Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP). I received a Joint-Ph.D. in 1994 in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University.
Trained in aesthetic theory, film studies, and art and literary criticism, my writing over the last years has focused on how contemporary artists work in different media to explore geological deep time and reconsider the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. One of the central aspects of this work is to feature art as a forum to complicate our understanding of dominant timescales and probe generative assemblies of different memories, tempos, and rhythms.
In my current book project, Expanded Listening: Elemental Media and the Deep Time of Contemporary Art, I dramatically expand the framework of some of my earlier writing on speed and slowness in contemporary artistic practice. The book inserts itself into timely (and untimely) discussions about the Anthropocene while pivoting earlier inquiries more prominently around works and conceptual interventions from the Global South.
Though driven by considerable theoretical interests, my work typically relies on generous readings and resonant engagements with specific works. I write about the arts as much as I write with and think along them. Art, I insist, has unique potentials to facilitate transformative conversations across disciplines and geographies.
Over the last few decades, I have published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. I am the author of Resonant Matter: Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality (2021); Fitzcarraldo (2019); Michael Bay: World Cinema in the Age of Populism (2018); The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (2017); On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014); Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007); The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002); Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999); and of Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1994). I am the co-author of Windows | Interface (2007), [Grid ‹ › Matrix] (2006), and the co-editor of various anthologies on ambiguity in contemporary art and theory, the culture of neoliberalism, German cinema, sound culture, new media aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and questions of exile.
I am also a member of the AOI Collaboratory at Vanderbilt University. The first episode of our podcast, Art of Interference: Art and Climate Change, was released in May 2023. Art of Interference is designed to have four seasons with about ten episodes each.