media studies – medieninitiative

CFP: Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2026: Periodization

After a one-year hiatus, the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media is back! The theme for 2026 is Periodization, and we’ll meet for the week of June 22-26 in Berlin.

How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. Although they “have no witnesses” (Blumenberg), they constitute a persistent schematism that has proven extremely productive since the so‑called »saddle time« (Koselleck). Periodizations structure time and allow for “significant” markers, enable narrative schemes, stabilize institutions and epistemologies, and in this way also shape concepts of the future and of expected caesuras. They operate as lasting calls to recognize patterns which, when new ones are discovered, may dissolve or remain resilient and continue to have an effect. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations.

The Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2026: Periodization will address the following core areas: theories and models of periodization (e.g. epochal thresholds, longue durée, kairos, tipping points); epistemological foundations and implications of the division of time; critique of traditional concepts of epochs; media and disciplinary histories of periodization in different fields (history, literature, philosophy, art, theology, etc.); global perspectives on periodization (asynchronicity, but also cyclical, genealogical, or cosmological temporal orders); and the media and materialities of periodization (calendars, chronicles, exhibitions, textbooks, AI, forensics).

Core Faculty

1. Adrian Daub (Comparative Literature, Stanford)

2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies, Stanford)

3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)

4. Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Leuphana)

5. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)

6. Lea Pao (German Studies, Stanford)

7. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)

8. Aileen Robinson (Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford)

Special Guests

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)

Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)

further guests to be announced…

Application

All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.

Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,

Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf. Please email your applications by March 13, 2026 to stanleu@leuphana.de.

The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.

General information

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.

Click the image above to read the full CFP!

Methods Cafe: “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media” — Austin Anderson and Shane Denson in Conversation, Feb. 11, 2026

“Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media.”

Videogames and race have intermingled since the earliest days of the medium, yet game studies has yet to develop a sustained methodology to contend with the racial logics and aesthetic practices embedded within game texts. How do videogames function as racial projects? Does race function as a structuring force within game design? How do the structures of repetition inherent to games hold and transmit racial meaning?

Please join us for a conversation around these questions and more between Austin Anderson (Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in English) on his in-progress book Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies and Shane Denson (Professor of Film & Media Studies) on his ongoing work in seriality across media forms.

More info here.

“The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Users)” — Neta Alexander at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 18, 2023

Please join us for our next Digital Aesthetics Workshop event with Neta Alexander, who will deliver “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Users).” The meeting will take place April 18th from 5-7pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as usual. Below find a description of the talk, a bio for Neta, and a poster for lightweight distribution. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Zoom registration for those unable to attend in person: https://tinyurl.com/2yc6eshy

Description:
Speed-watching, an understudied-yet-ubiquitous spectatorial mode, is often described by users as a productivity tool that can help them become digital “super-users.” This talk situates this emerging mode of spectatorship within longer histories of media consumption, connecting it to both efficiency and disability activism. Using Netflix as a case study, I focus on the recent public debate surrounding its failed attempt to add a playback speed feature to its streaming platform. World-renowned filmmakers pushed Netflix to shelve this idea when it was first introduced in 2018, claiming their films were not intended to be watched twice as fast. Yet, citing “requests from deaf and blind subscribers,” Netflix decided to add this feature to its interface in August 2020, when millions were sheltering-in-place due to the pandemic. This presentation asks what led to this decision, and what can the marketing discourse surrounding it teach us about how corporations monetize “accessibility.” Theorizing the difference between “time-shifting” and “time-hacking”, I argue that speed-watching is a mode of survival enabling different users to advance a wide range of goals: media literacy, the thrill of speed, and avoiding a mortifying fear of boredom.

Bio:
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Colgate University, NY and an Assistant Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Her articles have appeared in Journal of Visual Culture, Cinema Journal, Cinergie, Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow Journal, among other publications. Her first book, Failure (co-authored with Arjun Appadurai; Polity, 2020) studies how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness.

CFP: 2023 Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies — “Media and Cultural Change”

I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 4th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 25-30, 2023)!

The topic this year is “Media and Cultural Change”

Our core faculty this year are:

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Bernhard Siegert (History and Epistemology of Cultural Techniques, Weimar)

Special Guests:

Simon Denny (University of Fine Arts Hamburg)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) — to be confirmed

As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!

CFP: 2022 Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on “Scale”

CFP Stanford-Leuphana Summe… by medieninitiative

Update: Deadline extended until March 15! (If you are unable to download or access the PDF above, please use this alternate link.)

I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 3rd annual Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media, which — pandemic permitting — will again take place in Berlin (June 20-24, 2022)!

The topic this year is “Scale”

Our core faculty this year are:

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Melissa Gregg (Cultural Studies, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Mike Ananny (Communication and Journalism, USC)

Guest speaker: Kate Crawford (NYU)

As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Summer Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!

Pandemic Media — full PDF now available

The full PDF of Pandemic Media, an open-access collection edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini, is now available for download (here).

The volume contains 37 short chapters on various aspects of media and mediated experience under conditions of the pandemic, divided into 5 sections: Time/Temporality, Space/Scale, Technologies/Materialities, Education/Instruction, and Activism/Sociability.

The last section includes my essay on Zoom and related screen-based forms of interaction: “‘Thus isolation is a project.’ Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life.” There are lots of other things to discover in this book, though, so check it out!

“Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem” — Rachel Plotnick at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Announcing the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s first event of 2020: On February 11th, at 5 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Watt Common Room, we’ll be hosting Rachel Plotnick, who will share some recent research on cleanliness and computation.

Dr. Plotnick is an Assistant Professor in the Media School at the University of Indiana-Bloomington. Her (fantastic!) first book, Power Button: a History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, is just out from MIT Press.

Here is the abstract for her talk:

Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem

Histories of computing tend to focus on particular elements of computation (such as invention of computers; early PC use; interface design, or viruses), but this study aims to approach computing from a novel, alternative angle – mess. From the earliest advent and use of computers, mess has been a particularly thorny problem that gets defined differently in different contexts, across technologies and spaces, and through a variety of computing practices. Computing is inherently messy: screens, mice, disks and keyboards pick up dirt, dust and crumbs; messy bodies touch and handle computers day in and day out; air is full of unclean particles; and problems of humidity, temperature, and static are routine. At the level of software, too, metaphors of cleanliness and dirtiness persist in terms of “clean” design, “dirty” content or data, desktop icon organization, and fears over contagion and contamination from viruses and spam. By beginning from the vantage point of mess, it becomes possible to crystallize a very different history of computing driven from efforts to contain, control and eliminate dirt, to valorize cleanliness, and to enforce particular protocols, habits, and behaviors. In the messy interface between bodies, environments, software, and hardware one can find persistent concerns about what it means to be “human” and what it means to be “technology.” At the same time, this approach weaves in discussions of care, maintenance, and repair into computing, recognizing that innovation is not the only – or always most salient – way to understand human-technology relations, and that in fact much of everyday interactions with computers take place in acts of protection and cleaning. Innovation may also occur as a result of particular messiness problems, rather than the other way around. Lest we think of mess as a computing problem of the past (given ethereal metaphors of “cloud” computing and increasingly encased computing devices), recent examples of messiness demonstrate the ongoing problem of cleanliness in computing. A few representative cases include: Apple’s continued problems with its butterfly keyboard; concerns over “dirty” databases and how to clean big data; and the booming market for cases, screen protectors, and cleaning devices for tablets, laptops and smartphones.

CFP: Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2020: “Technologies of Bureaucracy: Before and After the Digital Turn”

Stanford-Leuphana Summer Ac… by medieninitiative on Scribd

I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 2nd annual Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media, which will take place June 22-26, 2020 in Berlin!

The topic this year is “Technologies of Bureaucracy: Before and After the Digital Turn!”

Our faculty and guest speakers this year are:

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Wendy Chun (New Media, Vancouver)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Monika Dommann (History, Zurich)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
Robin Holt (Organization Studies, Copenhagen)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Hito Steyerl (Experimental Film and Video, Berlin)
Peter Stohschneider (Medieval Studies, Munich) tbc
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)

As in the previous year, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Summer Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!

Out Now: Serial Figures and the Evolution of Media in NECSUS

The latest issue of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies has just come out. As always, it is freely accessible as an open-access publication, and it is chock full of articles, reviews, audiovisual essays, and a special section on “Mapping.”

Among the feature articles is an article I co-authored with Ruth Mayer on “Border Crossings: Serial Figures and the Evolution of Media” — a text that outlines some of the topics we covered in our research project within the DFG Research Unit on “Popular Seriality” from 2010 – 2013. This is a slightly revised translation of a text that first appeared in German in Frank Kelleter’s edited collection Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. We are happy to see this text made available in English, and especially happy that it found a home at NECSUS, which is the perfect venue for this transatlantic and interdisciplinary kind of media studies work.

Check out the whole issue here!

Out Now: Media Fields 13 — Mediating the Anthropocene

The new issue of Media Fields, devoted to the topic of “Mediating the Anthropocene,” is out now. Included among the many exciting contributions is my article “Post-Cinema After Extinction.” Check out the whole issue here.