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Department of German,
Russian and East European Studies

Lutz Koepnick

Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies | Professor of Cinema & Media Arts
Director, Comparative Media Analysis and Practice

Lutz Koepnick is the Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies and a Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he also directs  the joint-Ph.D. program in Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP). He received a Joint-Ph.D. in 1994 in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University.

Koepnick has published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author 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). Koepnick is 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. His current projects include a book on the aesthetics of interference and on expanded notions of listening.

Specializations

media theory and new media aesthetic, art cinema, photography, intellectual history, temporality in the arts


Representative publications

Recent Books

  • 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 and Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014)

Recent Essays (selection)

  • “Face Time with Hitler.” Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right. Eds. Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 111-133.
  • “The Nightmares of Reason: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Murder of Crows.” Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Eds. Eva Ebersberger and Daniela Zyman. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020. 374-389.
  • “Transatlantic Passage: Cinema and the Figure of the Migrant.” Transatlantic Cinema: Production—Genres—Encounters—Negotiations. Eds. Karsten Fitz and Jürgen Kamm. Passau: Ralf Schuster Verlag, 2020. 163-180.
  • “Figures of Resonance: Reading at the Edges of Attention.” SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience. 8.1 (2019): 4-19.
  • “Benjamin’s Baudelaire.” Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives. Ed. Ranjan Ghosh. New York: Columbia University, 2019. 43-55.
  • “East of Berlin: Berlin School Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Blandess.” The Berlin School and its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema. Eds. Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 211-231.
  • “Deep Sounds and the Wondrous.” Archäologie der Spezialeffekte. Eds. Natascha Adamowsky, Nicola Gees, Mireille Schnyder. Hugues Marchal and Johannes Bartuschat. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018. 31-46
  • “Laura Mulvey the Curious Cinephile.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15.4 (2017): 441-445
  • “Kluge’s Moments of Calm.” Stichwort: Kooperation. Keiner ist alleine schlau genug. Ed.Rainer Stollmann, Thomas Combrink and Gunther Martens. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017. [Special edition of Aleander Kluge-Jahrbuch 4 | 2017]
  • “Gesamtkunstwerk.” Cambridge History of Modernism. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 273-288.