Pandemic Media

Philipp Dominik Keidl is Assistant Professor of Screen Media in Transition at Utrecht University. His research focuses on media fandom, film heritage, and queer cinema. He is the coordinator of MI3: Media Industries, Infrastructures, and Institutions (Utrecht University) and a member of the Platform Lab (Concordia University).

Laliv Melamed is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her forthcoming book Sovereign Intimacy: Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss, is based on her dissertation with the same title that was the recipient of the 2017 SCMS Dissertation Award. She had published in English and Hebrew on topics of non-fiction media forms, Israel-Palestine, and the militarization of everyday media practices. Her most recent publications appeared in American Anthropologist Review and New Cinemas. She is the co-editor of the “Screen Memory” issue of International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society and a special issue on documentary infrastructures of the journal World Records, entitled “Ways of Organizing.” She is the director of the 2020 edition of Visible Evidence, the international conference for documentary and non-fiction film and media to be hosted by Goethe University, Frankfurt. In addition to her academic work, Melamed is a film curator and a programmer.

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt and the Director of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film.” He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal for Media Studies). He is a principal investigator in the research center “ConTrust – Trust and Conflict in political life under conditions of uncertainty” and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. His research concerns the aesthetics of film within the larger framework of a history of risk and uncertainty in modernity. His objects of study include Hollywood cinema and industrial and ephemeral films. In addition, he has a strong interest in the main currents, deviations, and dead ends in the histories of film theories, an interest that he pursues in part as the co-editor of the book series Film Theory in Media History. In the Kolleg he conjoins these two interests by inquiring into the ways in which the history of cinema has always been a history of a form, and format, in crisis.

Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where he is also Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies. His research interests include the history of film and media theories, as well as issues in contemporary visual culture, such as the implications of the high and low definition of images, and of the new technologies of machine vision. He can be reached at antonio.somaini[at]sorbonne-nouvelle.fr.