Academic interests
My research aligns the history of visual media with the histories of knowledge, capital and colonialism from the early modern period until today.
Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford University Press, 2022) situates the two key optical apparatuses of the later seventeenth century – camera obscuras and magic lanterns – within the intellectual and economic transitions that took place during the period when finance superseded the divine as the main driver of human affairs. Projecting Spirits was the winner of 2023 Limina Award for the Best International Book in Film Studies.
My first book, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam University Press, 2010) plots a moment of change in scientific and philosophical configurations of the human mind and body at the turn of the nineteenth century when we started to think of ourselves "cinematically." Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (MIT Press, 2014) – a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 – studies how the brain-screen interfaces of video games and virtual reality applications are put to work in today's capitalist reality.
I am currently co-leader, with Aurora Hoel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), of the research project "Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change" funded by the Research Council of Norway (2023-2027). Within this project, I am doing research for a book tentatively entitled "Another New World: Conquests of the Deep Sea in Planetary Capitalism."
I am a member of the Visual Studies research group at IFIKK, as well as the Screen Cultures research initiative at the Faculty of Humanities.
Research fellows working with me at IFIKK:
- Idil Cetin (MSCA postdoctoral fellow)
- William Wessel Nore (doctoral research fellow)
Courses taught
KUN2235/4235 Archaeology of the Moving Image
KUN1003 Introduction to Visual Studies
KUN2232/4232 Philosophies of the Image
MEVIT4700 Screen Histories and Theories
Background
Before taking up my position at IFIKK, I was Reader in Film and Screen Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. I earned my doctorate from the University of Turku, Finland, where I am also a Docent in Media History and Theory.