Academic interests
My work locates the history of images within the histories of knowledge, capital, and colonialism from the early modern period until today. I have an appetite for a wide range of pictures and artefacts, spanning scientific visualizations, technical drawings, data sets, conceptual models, specimens, religious imagery, and popular forms.
My key concern to date has been how visual media have aligned with and enabled key epistemic shifts and transitions in Western thought within changing political and economic circumstances. Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford University Press, 2022; winner of 2023 Limina Award for the Best International Book in Film Studies) 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and magic lanterns – within the intellectual and economic transitions that took place during the period when finance superseded the divine as the main driver of human affairs. 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 together with neuroscientific discourses are put to work in today's capitalist reality.
My current research charts the significance of visual media in the context of what one might call the political ecology of oceans. I am interested in the data-driven image cultures, both past and present, within which oceanic environments are turned into objects of knowledge, government and gain. 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," which explores current prospects for deep sea mining and their tricky heritage.
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.
