“Mapping Modern Media Concepts and Examples”, a Lecture by Dr. Simon Ganahl, Presented by the Department of Germanic Languages and the Digital Humanities Program

In this talk, Simon Ganahl presents his ongoing research into mediality as modern field of experience. He will discuss a working definition of mediation as historical pattern that relates mediators in terms of space, time, and value. His approach is based on a methodological combination of Latour’s actor-network, Foucault’s dispositif, and Bakhtin’s chronotope. More practically, he will show examples from his mapping courses and from his case study Campus Medius, which explores a so-called Turks Deliverance Celebration in Vienna on May 14, 1933.

Simon Ganahl is currently a habilitation fellow (APART) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Zurich, Liechtenstein, and Vorarlberg. He studied communications and German philology in Vienna, Hamburg, and Zurch (PhD in both fields). In 2012-13, he was a post-doc scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. In spring 2016, he is a visiting researcher and instructor at UCLA in the Department of Germanic Languages and the Digital Humanities Program. He is the co-editor of the reviewed foucaultblog, and head of the digital mapping project Campus Medius: Mediality as Experience, 1683-1933. His latest book is: Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg: Eine Typologie moderner Haltungen (Konstanz University Press 2015).