Biographies
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Tatjana Böhme-Mehner
Independent scholar, Leipzig (D)
Tatjana Böhme-Mehner studied musicology and journalism at Universität Leipzig, completing both Master and PhD degrees, and specializing in electroacoustic music, music theory, music sociology, and music and media. Since 2003 she has undertaken postdoctoral research projects on electroacoustic aesthetics in France and Germany and electroacoustics in the German Democratic Republic, supported by a DAAD/MSH Research Fellowship in Paris. Tatjana Böhme-Mehner has produced a wide range of publications, projects, and paper presentations, giving lectures and courses at several German universities. She has recently been intensifying her activities as a composer (selected for several festivals of electroacoustic and experimental music as well as radio programs).
Tim Boon
Science Museum, London (GB)
Tim Boon is Head of Research and Public History at the Science Museum, London. In this role, he is responsible both for promoting academic research and for researching and developing approaches to the effective communication of academic understanding to and with lay audiences. Prior to this he was Chief Curator and Head of Collections at the museum, where he had responsibility for the curatorial team and for the development of policies in relation to the museum’s collections and their development. Tim Boon’s exhibitions include Health Matters (1994), Making the Modern World (2000), and Oramics to Electronica (2011). He has published on museology and on the use of films and television in science and medicine; his first book, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television was published in 2008. He is currently Principal Investigator on two AHRC-funded projects: one is a research network on the public history of science, the other is a historical intermedial comparison of science television and museum displays in the 1950s and 1960s. His next book is Artefacts: Material Culture and Electronic Sound, a collection co-edited with Frode Weium.
Daniel Brandau
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Daniel Brandau is a PhD candidate and research associate in the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century” at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He studied history, German literature and education at Universität Bielefeld where he received his BA in 2007 and his MEdu in 2010. At the University of Cambridge he finished an MPhil in Modern European History in 2009. During his studies in Cambridge, Brandau worked on early German space history, 1880s-1940s, and continues to pursue this research interest in Berlin. His PhD project focuses on “Visions of Feasibility: Rocketry and Spaceflight Enthusiasm in Britain and Germany, 1920s-1960s,” studying visions of future spaceflight and reciprocities with socio-cultural discourse from the period of early rocket societies to the first manned missions.
Klara Anna Capova
Durham University (GB)
Klara A. Capova is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Durham University. She is specializing in anthropology of science and currently working on her ethnographic dissertation on scientific search for other life in the universe and current concepts of other life as understood, perceived, and interpreted by the scientific community and in popular culture. Klara Capova completed her master’s degree in general anthropology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2008. She has studied anthropological aspects of interstellar messages and worked on content analysis of the Pioneer Plaque and Voyager Interstellar Record. Her recent research interests include sociocultural dimension of space exploration, attempts to detect life beyond Earth, and scientific entrepreneurship.
Paweł Frelik
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (P)
Paweł Frelik teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. His teaching and research interests include science fiction and its visualities, postmodern literature and theory, unpopular culture, and transmedia storytelling. He is the author of numerous articles in these fields and co-edited three books, including Playing the Universe: Games and Gaming in Science Fiction (2007). He is currently working on a book about science fiction visualities beyond film and television. Paweł Frelik is also the editor of the European Journal of American Studies, an editorial consultant for Science Fiction Studies and Extrapolation, and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Between 1993 and 2004 he was the deputy editor of Poland’s most popular extreme music magazine, in which he wrote extensively on extreme metal genres, industrial music, ambient and drones, and experimental music.
Alexander C.T. Geppert
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Alexander Geppert directs the Emmy Noether research group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century” at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He received master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Geppert has held fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, the EHESS in Paris, the German Historical Institutes in London and in Paris, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, and at Harvard University. Recent book publications include Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010), Wunder: Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert (2011, co-ed.), Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2012, ed.) and Astroculture and Technoscience (2012), a special issue of History and Technology. At present, he is working on a comprehensive cultural history of the European Space Age.
Stefan Helmreich
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (USA)
Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who has written widely in the field of sound studies. He has also been writing recently on what he has termed “extraterrestrial relativism.” Helmreich received his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University and, prior to coming to MIT, held fellowships at Cornell, Rutgers and NYU. His research examines the works and lives of biologists thinking through the limits of “life” as a category of analysis. His last book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. The book charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, and the possibility of life on other worlds. An earlier book, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (1998), is an ethnography of computer modeling in the life sciences. Helmreich’s newest research concerns the cultural circulation of such abstractions as “water,” “sound,” and “waves.” His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, and The Wire.
Konstantin Kaminskij
Universität Konstanz (D)
Konstantin Kaminskij studied Russian and German literature and history of art in St. Petersburg and Konstanz. He is currently employed as research fellow at the Chair of slavic literatures at Universität Konstanz. His research interests are interaction of politics and poetics, history of science in Russia and contemporary Russian mass-media. His PhD project deals with narrative and aesthetical representation of Soviet Electrification Campaign in the works of Andrei Platonov.
Cathleen Lewis
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (USA)
Cathleen Lewis is Curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, specializing in Soviet and Russian programs. Lewis has completed both bachelor’s and a master’s degrees in Russian and East European studies at Yale University and completed her dissertation for her PhD in History, “The Red Stuff: A History of the Public and Material Culture of Early Human Spaceflight in the USSR, 1959-1968,” at George Washington University in 2008. Her current research is on the history of the public and popular culture of Russian fascination with the idea of human spaceflight in the Soviet Union. Cathleen Lewis has written about the artifacts in the Smithsonian’s Soviet and Russian collection and has published articles comparing the Soviet and American approaches to exhibiting spaceflight during the Space Race and the history of film portrayals of spaceflight prior to Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight. She is also working on a comparative history of the development of American and Russian spacesuits.
Michael Mooradian Lupro
Portland State University, Oregon (USA)
Michael Mooradian Lupro teaches race and social justice, human/nature, and film studies as an assistant professor at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. He earned a PhD in American culture studies at Bowling Green State University in 2009. His dissertation, Space Oddities for the Age of Space Tourism, concentrates on the nexus of space tourism and popular music. He was a founding member of AmeriCorps, Culture Club (the Culture Studies Student Association, not the band featuring Boy George) and the Battleground States Book Collective. He currently serves as book reviews editor for the Journal of Popular Music and Society.
William R. Macauley
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
William R. Macauley is a postdoctoral research associate in the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century” at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he studied at the University of Manchester where he received his BSc (Hons) in psychology, MSc and PhD in science, technology and medicine. His doctoral thesis Picturing Knowledge: NASA’s Pioneer Plaque, Voyager Record and the History of Interstellar Communication, 1957–1977 is on visual representation of scientific knowledge and interdisciplinary approaches to interstellar communication. Macauley’s postdoctoral research focuses on ways in which various professional and social groups in the UK and other parts of Europe produced and communicated knowledge about space and spaceflight from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. His recent publications include “Crafting the Future: Envisioning Space Exploration in Post-war Britain” (2012) in History and Technology and a chapter “Inscribing Scientific Knowledge: Interstellar Communication, NASA’s Pioneer Plaque, and Contact with Cultures of the Imagination, 1971–1972” in the book Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2012). Macauley is currently working on a monograph based on his doctoral thesis, as well as other publications related to his postdoctoral research.
Peter Moormann
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Peter Moormann is a Research Associate in the Department of Musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin working within the Collaborative Research Centre 626 on Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. He is the editor of "Klassiker der Filmmusik" (2009), "Musik im Fernsehen (2010) and "Music and Game. Perspectives on a Popular Alliance" (2012) and has had many articles published about music in films and in other media. His doctoral thesis regarding the relationship between Steven Spielberg and his composer John Williams was published in 2010 after being previously awarded the Johannes Gutenberg Prize in 2008. Currently he is working on a book about the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
Klaus Nathaus
Universität Bielefeld (D)
Klaus Nathaus studied history, philosophy and German literature in Bochum and Berlin and finished his PhD at Humboldt Universität in 2008. At present, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. His research interests include the history of leisure, sports and popular culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and Britain, the history of clubs and associations, markets in historical and sociological perspective and the history of the popular music business in the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book on the production of popular music in twentieth-century Germany.
Trevor Pinch
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (USA)
Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. He holds degrees in physics and sociology. He has authored and co-authored eighteen books and numerous articles on aspects of the sociology of science, the sociology of technology, the sociology of economics and sound studies. His major studies have included quantum physics, solar neutrinos, parapsychology, health economics, market pitching, the bicycle, the car, the electronic music synthesizer, internet music, product reviews and most lately smart phones. His books include Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2002; with Frank Trocco) and Dr Golem: How To Think About Medicine (2005; with Harry Collins;). He is also editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012; with Karin Bijsterveld). Trevor Pinch is a performing musician and in December 2010 released a CD, The Electric Golem.
Claudia Schmölders
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (D)
Claudia Schmölders studied German literature, musicology and philosophy in Cologne, Zurich, Berlin and New York. In 1973 she received a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin; from 1975 through 1999 she worked as editor at various publishing houses as well as independent author, academic editor and lecturer at the universities of Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Berlin. She held fellowships at the Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin; and completed her Habilitation at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Seminar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in 1997. Since 1998 Claudia Schmölders has been working as Privatdozentin, lecturer, and author. Her main publications include Die Kunst des Gesprächs: Texte zur Geschichte der europäischen Konversationstheorie (1979, 1986); Das Vorurteil im Leibe: Eine Einführung in die Physiognomik (1995, 3d edn 2007); Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (2000, with Sander Gilman); and Hitlers Gesicht: Eine physiognomische Biographie (2000; English 2005).
Matthias Schwartz
Freie Universität Berlin (D)
Matthias Schwartz is a research fellow and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. He studied Russian studies, Polish studies and modern history in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw and wrote his PhD thesis on the cultural history of Soviet adventure literature and science fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s. His other research interests include the interplay of science and arts in Russia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century; Soviet and Post-Soviet popular culture studies; and young Polish, Russian and Ukrainian literature in a globalized world.
Johan Stenström
Lund University (SE)
Johan Stenström is Professor of Comparative and Swedish Literature at Lund University. Until recently, he was also the director of Lund University’s School of Creative Writing. Many of his works deal with questions about literature and its relation to other arts, especially the relationship between literature and music. In his dissertation Aniara – från versepos till opera (1994) he analyzed the transformation of Harry Martinson’s verse epic Aniara into an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl including, for instance, how genre-specific operatic features have affected the transformation of the text. His latest monograph is about the reception of Carl Michael Bellman, poet and singer-songwriter of the eighteenth century. Building on the idea that memory is a social and cultural phenomenon, he examines different manifestations of a cultural memory connected with Bellman. Stenström is currently directing a research project that includes scholars from several disciplines within the humanities. The project focuses on Jacob Jonas Björnståhl, orientalist and traveller during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Alexandra Supper
Maastricht University (NL)
Alexandra Supper is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department for Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, doing research at the intersection of science and technology studies, and sensory studies. She previously studied sociology at the University of Vienna, where she also worked as a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Social Studies of Science. In 2008 she relocated to Maastricht to obtain a PhD. In June 2012 she defended her dissertation Lobbying for the Ear: The Public Fascination with and Academic Legitimacy of the Sonification of Scientific Data. In this dissertation, she analyzed the emergence of a scientific/artistic community dedicated to sonification and that community’s struggles to have listening to data accepted as a scientific approach. She has published an article on sonification in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012) and contributed to a recent volume on the cultural history of sonification (Das geschulte Ohr: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Sonifikation, 2012).
Axel Volmar
Universität Siegen (D)
Axel Volmar is a faculty member of the Department for Media Studies at Universität Siegen. Recently he finished his PhD thesis on the auditory culture of science since 1800. Volmar has published various articles on time-critical media and auditory culture and is the co-editor of several edited volumes including Zeitkritische Medien (2009), Das geschulte Ohr: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Sonifikation (2012), and Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung (2012).
Eliad Wagner
Composer and Musician, Berlin (D)
Eliad Wagner is a musician, composer and programmer currently based in Berlin. He holds academic degrees in physics and composition of electronic music. In his work he explores electronic sounds, composition and multimedia using analogue/modular synthesizers and computer programming. Eliad Wagner’s music often deals with free improvisation, alternative scoring, electroacoustic/ acousmatic composition and instrument design. It has been published by Metropolis Records, Digital Kranky, C-sides and Concrete Plastic, and presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Rotterdam International film festival, Computer Music Journal, Guggenheim New York and the Danish Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, among others. He is cofounder and curator of the electronica label ±g6pd records.
James Wierzbicki
University of Sydney (AUS)
James Wierzbicki is a senior lecturer in musicology at the University of Sydney in Australia. Before taking up this position in 2010, he taught musicology in the United States at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Irvine. For more than twenty years he was also chief classical music critic for various large American newspapers. Along with exploring questions of modernity and the postmodern, his research focuses on twentieth-century music in general, on electronic music, and – especially – on film music. James Wierzbicki’s monographs include a study of the electronic score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (2005), Film Music: A History (2009), and Elliott Carter (2011); he is co-editor of the Routledge Film Music Source Book (2011) and Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema (2012). Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Musical Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, Beethoven Forum, and Music and the Moving Image. His current project is a study of American music in the 1950s, regarded through such societal ‘filters’ as postwar technology, race relations, and sexual politics.
