Second International Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies
Princeton, June 17–23, 2012
Exploring the “Spaces of Media,” the International Summer School for Media Studies—a co-operation between the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, IKKM) and Princeton University (Department of German)—will be held in the United States for the first time. The one-week program will take place on the campus of Princeton University from June 17 – June 23, 2012.
The 2012 Princeton-Weimar Summer School will focus on the complex intersections of media and space. Media Studies started with Harold A. Innis’s exploration of the role of media in shaping the cultural and political spaces of societies. Yet the question of how to understand the ways in which spaces, localities, and modes of navigation in such domains are all generated by media remains an urgent challenge for today’s Media Studies.
How much do we know about the history of navigation and its technologies and techniques, from maps and compasses to the latest GPS devices, and how are we to understand the ways of navigating by and within files, books, and writing? Do we fully understand the ways in which the spatiality of the diagrammatic contributes to the operations of the signifier, whether in the production of meaning or in the production of economic values, or administrative control? Do we have an adequate grasp on the way in which media of distribution and circulation affect the constitution and control of geographic spaces? And do we still believe in media utopias, according to which space has been successfully annihilated as an insignificant factor thanks to high transmission speeds and minimal transaction costs?
The 2012 summer school will be directed by Bernhard Siegert (Weimar) and Nikolaus Wegmann (Princeton).
This year’s faculty includes
Jimena Canales (Harvard), Christoph Engemann (Weimar), Devin Fore (Princeton), Laura Frahm (Weimar), Mladen Gladić (Princeton), Ben Kafka (New York), Joel Lande (Princeton), Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton), Emily Thompson (Princeton), and Anna Tuschling (Bochum).
The Summer School for Media Studies is open to advanced students and doctoral candidates of media studies and related fields (e.g. film studies, the philologies, philosophy, art history, sociology, politics, the history of science, visual culture, architecture, etc.)
For more information about the program and on how to apply please visit: