Books
Wireless Futures: Speculative Media and German Modernity
Edinburgh University Press, 2026
What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean ‘Wi-Fi,’ before ‘the wireless’ meant ‘radio,’ even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.
Essays, Articles, Chapters
“Pflug, Feder, Feld. Literarische Arbeit und Kulturtechnik.” [Plow, Quill, Field: Literary Work and Cultural Techniques.] In Landwirtschaft & Literatur [Agriculture and Literature], edited by Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen, 113–134. Diaphanes, 2025.
“German Media Studies: A Critical Update.” New German Critique 150, vol. 50, no. 3 (2023): 5–24.
“What was Time Axis Manipulation?” In Friedrich Kittler: Neue Lektüren, edited by Jens Schröter and Till A. Heilmann (Berlin: Springer, 2022).
“Zeitlupe: Cinematic Technique and Literary Form in the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 44.3 (2021): 469–488.
“Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks.” In ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni, edited by Erica Tortolani and Martin F. Norden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
“Some Omissions in the Universal Library: Kurd Lasswitz and the Emergence of Science Fiction.” Monatshefte 110.4 (Winter 2018): 529–551.
“Going Wireless in the Belle Époque.” Continent 7.1 (Spring 2018): 5–16.
“The Promise of Television.” The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933. Companion Website (October 2017).
“Media Archaeology, Cultural Techniques, and the Middle Ages: An Approach to the Study of Media before The Media.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 52.2 (2016): 107–133.
“A Little History of the Wireless Icon.” Palais des Beaux Arts Wien (June 2015).
“Notation: From Scrolls to Scores.” In Hans Richters Rhythmus 21. Schlüsselfilm der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012.
Editorial Work
Erik Born, Andrew Hicks, and Simone Pinet, eds. “Soundbites: Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to Sound and Literature.” Special issue, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism. Forthcoming 2026.
Erik Born and Tres Lambert, eds. “Newspaper and Radio.” In The Red Vienna Sourcebook, edited by Ingo Zechner, Georg Spitaler, and Rob McFarland, 540–558. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Simultaneous Publication of German Edition: Das Rote Wien. Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne 1919–1934. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020.
“Diskussionsbericht Sektion 1: Praktiken der Einfachheit.” In Komplexität und Einfachheit: DFG-Symposium 2015, edited by Albrecht Koschorke, 167–72. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2017.
Yael Almog and Erik Born, eds. Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living-Together in the German-Speaking World. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Book Reviews
Handbuch Virtualität, edited by Dawid Kasprowicz and Stefan Rieger, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 57.3 (September 2021): 327–330.
What Do We Really Know About Herta Herzog? Exploring the Life and Work of a Pioneer of Communication Research, edited by Elisabeth Klaus and Josef Seethaler, Yearbook of German-American Studies (2017).
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, by Patrick McGilligan, Yearbook of German-American Studies 50 (2015).
Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, by Noah Isenberg, Yearbook of German-American Studies 50 (2015).
The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand, Yearbook of German-American Studies 49 (2014).
Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen, and Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, edited by Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson, Yearbook of German-American Studies 48 (2013).
Peter Lorre: Face Maker. Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe, by Sarah Thomas, and The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin, Yearbook of German-American Studies 47 (2012).
Translations of Academic Work
Stäheli, Urs. “Undoing Networks.” In Tero Karppi et al., Undoing Networks, 1–30. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Florian Sprenger. “Environments of Experimentation and Epistemologies of Surroundings: John Scott Haldane’s Physiology and Biopolitics of the Living.” Grey Room 75 (Spring 2019): 6–35.
Timon Beyes and Jörg Metelmann, eds. The Creativity Complex: A Companion to Contemporary Culture. Translated by Erik Born and others. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. German Edition: Der Kreativitätskomplex. Ein Vademecum der Gegenwartsgesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018.
Andreas Bernard, “Elevator”; Monika Dommann, “Copy Machine”; Florian Hoof, “Calendar”; Markus Krajewski, “Cards”; Jörg Metelmann, “Whiteboard, Flipchart”; Stefan Rieger, “Office Plant.” In The Oxford Handbook on Media, Technology and Organization Studies, edited by Timon Beyes, Robbin Holt, and Claus Pias. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Helmut Lethen, “Amsterdam 1964”; Dennis Göttel, “Pinball Politics.” In The Legacy of Transgressive Objects, edited by Katja Müller-Helle. Berlin: August Verlag, 2018.
Moritz Wedell. “Numbers.” In Medieval Culture: A Compendium of Critical Topics, edited by Albrecht Classen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015: 1205–1260.
Translations of Literature, Culture, Theory
Kurd Lasswitz, “The Universal Library.” Mithila Review: The Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy 9 (September 2017).
Adolf Behne, “Film as a Work of Art”; Erich Grave, “The Third Dimension”; Willi Münzenberg, “Film and Propaganda”; R. Genenncher, “Film as a Means of Agitation”; “Vienna films!” In The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
Emine Sevgi Özdamar. “Guest Faces.” TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World 9.1 (2014).
Hakan Savaş Mican. “The Visit.” TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World 8.1 (2012)
Erik Born 