Current Research Projects

Magnus Rust

The Autonomous Self in the Age of Automation

This research project is the first to explore the work and influence of German-American computer science pioneer and social critic Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008).

Harun Maye

Theory and history of cultural techniques

Research on cultural techniques explicitly counters the ontological basis of philosophical concepts. Human beings cannot be conceived independently of cultural techniques of hominization; time does not function separately from cultural techniques of time measurement; and space remains a product of cultural techniques of spatial analysis.

Harun Maye

Reading as a Cultural Technique

Society-shaping theories, histories, practices, and media associated with reading will be presented in their complex interrelationships in two planned monographs: Mediengeschichte der Autorenlesung (The Mediatic History of Author Readings) and Theorien und Praktiken des Lesens (Reading: Theories and Practices).

Anne-Katrin Weber

Operative TV: Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom, 1930s-1990s

From video surveillance to online teaching, from drone warfare, highway management to telemedicine: closed-circuit images take up multiple spaces today. Despite being quotidian, their history remains largely unknown. The SNF-PRIMA project Operative TV pursues the goal to fill this gap by providing a study of audiovisual closed-circuits in the longue durée.

Lisa Cronjäger

Sustainability and accuracy in surveying and describing foreign forests

What practices were considered sustainable or unsustainable in the 19th century? How were these assessments related to forest use conflicts? Drawing on forestry textbooks, travelogues, journal articles, and alternative sources, Lisa Cronjäger's dissertation examines how forest division practices shaped notions of sustainability.

Markus Krajewski, Hannes Bajohr

Subaltern Mimesis

The joint project “Subaltern Mimesis” explores collaborative approaches to writing. By investigating how authors and editors work together as well as how authors use writing software, this project aims to elucidate the role of “invisible” actors in the writing process.

The (In)Audible Past

The SNSF-funded project “The (In)Audible Past” investigates sound archives in South Africa and Namibia, as well as collections held in Basel. It aims to establish a dialogue between Switzerland and Southern Africa while addressing the latter’s political cultures and colonial past.

Harun Maye

Working Together: Collaborative Literary Practices

This network aims to survey collaborative literary practices and how they have been integrated into discourse over an extensive historical period, spanning from the eighteenth century to the present day. One of the project’s key concerns is with the activities of peripheral and auxiliary figures in the literary world.

Markus Krajewski, Harun Maye et. al.

Commentary on Moby Dick

Since 2006, a group of scholars has met once a year to pursue an ambitious goal: providing each of Moby Dick's 135 chapters (including paratexts such as the excerpts at the beginning of the novel, blurb, etc.) with a commentary that is both historically rigorous and academically insightful.

Past research projects

Markus Krajewski, Mario Wimmer, Antonia von Schöning

Media of Accuracy. Ideals, practices, representations

Stefanie brewer

Electronic oscilloscopy in experimental film of the early 1950s

The early 1950s saw the emergence of experimental films that for the first time artistically processed electronic images. This dissertation project captures them for the first time as a corpus and examines the incorporation of electronic oscillograms into the animated films of Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), Hy Hirsh (1911-1961), and Norman McLaren (1914-1987) in 1951-54, looking at the intersection of electronics and cinematography (submitted September 2021).

Fiona Fehlmann

Is your public radio my public radio?

The question of the status of public broadcasting has hardly lost any of its explosive power in the age of networked communication - on the contrary: Public broadcasting organizations are once again increasingly at the center of heated debates throughout Europe. While some praise the journalistic quality of public media houses and recognize the tradition-rich media houses as a rock in the surf of disinformation circulating on the Internet, others question their performance agreements and call for a reduction or even abolition of radio and television fees.

Matthias Künzler (HTW Chur), Ulla Autenrieth, Klaus Neumann-Braun, Fiona Fehlmann

Progressive loss of acceptance by the target audience - the future of public service in Switzerland

In Switzerland and other countries, the audiovisual information and entertainment programs of the public broadcaster have been regarded as the core of the "public service", which had to make a democratically and socio-politically relevant contribution to information, debate, cultural development and integration. To a limited extent, Swiss law also assigns such a performance mandate to the licensed local-regional private broadcasters.

David Bucheli

Switzerland, seen from the cinematographer's point of view (1896-1900)

They are ghostly images that surfaced in 2018 from the magazines of the French National Cinematheque: A good thirty filmstrips exposed shortly before 1900 on locations all over Switzerland and thought to have been lost for 120 years. But what can we say today about the production circumstances and staging intentions of these films? What can we know about the nameless people who appear here for a few seconds in the eye of history? And how does early Swiss cinematography fit into a global network of media techniques, colonial capitalism and the consumer goods industry? The research and mediation project traces the traces of early cinematography in Switzerland in a documentary film.

Ute Holl

Radiophonic Cultures - Sonic environments and archives in hybrid media systems

The interdisciplinary research project Radiophonic Cultures explores the emergence of new sonic spaces and cultures of listening in radiophonic arrangements from early radio to its current digital reorganization. Going beyond a definition of the radio as institution, the concept of radiophonics followed in this research encompasses a larger history of the forms of production, composition, transmission, and perception of sounds as well as of the changing conceptions of sound and music that is linked to the radio and its apparatus, technologies, experiments and discourses.

Leonie Häsler

Design Structures. The organization and transformation of textile design in the industry

In fashion design, two-dimensional drawings are made based on research and mood boards, which are later to be realized as three-dimensional garments. The design goes through a transformation process in which different stages are represented and shaped by different medialities and materialities. The fact that the genius of the designer is not solely responsible for drafting and design, but that the cultural techniques, bodily practices and materials used play an active role in the shaping process, has been sufficiently researched in recent years in cultural studies, architecture and design research; design practice and research are considered an independent knowledge culture that not only applies knowledge, but also produces it.

Tatiana Eichenberger

Experimental Sound Laboratories of the Radio

The recording of sounds beyond scripture and notation, the recording "of the real" possible through gramophone recordings and the audiotape opened up new techniques of processing and new means of expression and can be described as the most important musical advance in the 20th century. The project examines the possibilities of aesthetic experiment under conditions of technical media arrangements in the electronic studios of the European broadcasting corporations in Paris, Cologne, Milan and London during the introduction phase of the magnetic tape.

Mario Wimmer

Ranke's Blindness

In my current book project, I am writing a history of an "ordinary historian," as his colleague at Berlin University, the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, called him. This is none other than Leopold Ranke, who is considered one of the founding figures of modern historical science on both sides of the Atlantic. To this day, Ranke is credited with fundamental methodological innovations and firmly established historical figures of argumentation.

Corinne Hügli

Media Currencies in Transition: History of Continuous Usage Research of Electronic Media in Switzerland.

The data from continuous audience research are used by the media stations for adequate program planning and are the "currency" in the advertising market for billing advertising contacts. They are decisive for the distribution of financial resources. According to the Stiftung Werbestatistik Schweiz (Swiss Advertising Statistics Foundation), net advertising sales in the electronic media sector in Switzerland amount to around CHF 1.5 billion a year.

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