I am currently organizing Cornell University’s Media Studies Colloquium. For an overview of my recent research, you can listen to this short radio piece on the “Wi-Fi Signal Icon” created for The Academic Minute: A WAMC National Production (December 2020).
With The World According to Sound, I also collaborated on the podcast series, “Media Objects.” You can hear me speaking about various approaches to doing media studies in the first episode, “Extensions.”
Upcoming Events
“AI before AI: Premodern Combinatorics.” Modern Language Association: Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, Forthcoming January 6–11, 2026.
“The Department Store of the Future: Class, Cooperation, and Commercialism in Early German Speculative Fiction.” German Studies Association: Annual Conference, Arlington, VA, Forthcoming September 25–28, 2025.
Recent Events
“Radio Beyond Radio: Interwar Literature and Media Philosophy.” Workshop, Unheimliche Allianzen. Strahlen- und Wellenphänomene in Literatur und Künsten der Zwischenkriegszeit,” [Uncanny Alliances: Ray and Wave Phenomena in Interwar Literaterature and Arts] Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC) Junior Host Program, Freie Universität (FU) Berlin, Germany, February 22, 2024.
“Siren Sounds.” International Congress on Medieval Studies: Annual Conference, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11, 2024.
“German TV Theories: Switching, Zapping, Experimenting.” German Studies Association: Annual Conference, Montréal, Québec, Canada, October 5–8, 2023.
Roundtable Co-Organizer, “Media Studies Now,” German Studies Association: Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, September 26–29, 2024.
Conference Co-Organizer, Medieval and Early Modern Soundscapes, Cornell University, November 4, 2023.
“The Digital University: Switches, Binaries, Polarizations.” Keynote Lecture Series: The Role of the Digital in the Study of Culture: New Horizons, Potentials, Challenges,” International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen, Germany, May 25, 2021.
Recent Publications
My essay, “German Media Studies: A Critical Update,” was published in a special issue of New German Critique, vol. 50, no. 3 (2023): 5–24.
My chapter, “What was Time Axis Manipulation?” appeared in Friedrich Kittler: Neue Lektüren, edited by Jens Schröter and Till A. Heilmann (Berlin: Springer, 2022).
My article on slow motion, “Zeitlupe: Cinematic Technique and Literary Form in the Weimar Republic,” was published in the German Studies Review 44.3 (2021): 469–488.
My review of the collected volume Handbuch Virtualität, edited by Dawid Kasprowicz and Stefan Rieger, can be found in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 57.3 (September 2021): 327–330.
My essay, “Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks,” appeared in ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni (Spring 2021), edited by Martin Norden and Erica Tortolani.
The Red Vienna Sourcebook, which contains a chapter I co-edited with Richard Lambert on “Newspapers and Radio”, appeared in Summer 2020. The German edition was published simultaneously as Das Rote Wien. Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne 1919–1934.
The Mithila Review: The Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy contains my translation of Kurd Lasswitz’s seminal short story “The Universal Library” (1904). My article on “Kurd Lasswitz and the Emergence of Science Fiction” can be found in Monatshefte 110.4 (Winter 2018): 529–551.
Erik Born 