Juan-Jacques Aupiais
Assistant Professor of German, Ohio State University
Juan-Jacques Aupiais is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. His interests include German Critical Thought, colonialism in German culture, translation studies, and migration and transnationalism in contemporary literature. His scholarship on Kluge has appeared in The Germanic Review and The Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch, and an article on Chronik der Gefühle is forthcoming in the upcoming Alexander Kluge-Handbuch. His current book project, Contact Traces: Translingual Writing and German Colonial Culture, critically maps the poetics and affordances of literary multilingualism in a transnational body of texts that construct, reconstruct, contest, and remember the cultural contours of German colonialism.
Michael W. Jennings
Professor Emeritus of German, Princeton University
Michael W. Jennings is the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages, Emeritus in the Department of German at Princeton University; he held associate positions in the Departments of Art and Archaeology and French and Italian and in the School of Architecture. He is the author of two books on Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1987) and, with Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard University Press, 2014). He served as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin’s works, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Harvard University Press, four volumes, 1996ff.) and the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin’s essays intended for classroom use, including The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2007); with Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (2008); and One Way Street (2016). His published work includes articles on the theory of art history (Alois Riegl, Wihelm Worringer), modernism in its relationship to capitalist modernity (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson), Weimar culture (Berlin Dada, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, forms of literary criticism), eighteenth-century aesthetics (Sturm und Drang, J.M.R. Lenz, Friedrich Hölderlin), modern media (print culture and modernism), and German photography (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Michael Schmidt). He is the editor, with Detlef Mertins, of a facsimile edition of the avantgarde journal G: Journal of Elemental Form-Creation, (Gerry Research Institute, 2010); with Tobias Wilke, of a special issue of Grey Room on Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Media; and with Stanley Corngold, of a special issue of Monatshefte on Kafka's Late Style.
Jennings collaborated with the author, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge on a number of projects. They came to know one another at a major international conference on Kluge’s work held at Princeton in 2004. In the years that followed, Jennings was a frequent guest on Kluge’s television program “News and Stories” and Kluge returned frequently to Princeton in the context of symposia on his work. In October 2016 Kluge’s final appearance at Princeton took the form of a major multimedia event with the title “A Narration.” Kluge’s dialogue partners and collaborators included Leslie Adelson, Devin Fore, Philipp Ekardt, Michael Jennings, Lutz Koepnick, Ben Lerner, and Jamie Rankin. A full description of the event is available here.
Jennings is currently at work on the first critical biography of Alexander Kluge.
Gertrud Koch
Professor Emerita of Film Studies, Freie Universität Berlin; Visiting Professor, Leuphana University Lüneburg
Gertrud Koch is professor emerita of Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She was from 2011-2022 visiting professor at Brown Universities Department of Modern Culture and Media and is since 2022 guest professor at Leuphana Unuversity in Lüneburg. Koch is advisory board member of many international journals like October, Philosophy& Social Criticism, Constellations and author of numerous books and essays, she contributed over the decades many essays and interviews with Alexander Kluge, whom she assisted as a young student at Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University where in 1973 Kluge became honorary professor.
Richard Langston
Professor of German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Richard Langston a professor of German Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a faculty member of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. He is the author of Dark Matter: A Guide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Verso Books: 2020), which will be published as Dunkle Materie: Ein Einführung in Oskar Negt und Oskar Kluge with Herbert von Halem Verlag in 2027. He is the editor of Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader and the forthcoming Only Utopias Are Realistic Now: An Oskar Negt Reader (Cornell UP: 2019, 2027). He is the lead translator of Negt and Kluge’s History and Obstinacy edited by Devin Fore and Kluge’s Kong’s Finest Hour (Seagull Press: 2018) and one of five co-editors who founded the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. He is currently organizing a touring exhibition of Kluge’s most recent work intended for American universities together with Hamburg-based artist Thomas Thiede, Duke art historian Paul Jaskot, Berlin-based curator Asmus Trautsch, Kluge’s AdK archivist Christoph Stampfl and Kluge’s videographer Barbara Barnak.
Sarah Morris
UK-born artist Sarah Morris lives and works in New York. Morris has been making abstract paintings and films to investigate what she describes as “urban, social and bureaucratic typologies.” These works, based on different cities, are derived from close inspection of architectural details combined with a critical sensitivity to the psychology of a city and its key protagonists. Morris has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2024); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2023); Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich, Germany (2023); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2023); Jesus College, Cambridge, UK (2019); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2017); M Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2015); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); and Modern Art Oxford, UK (1999). Group exhibitions include Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille, France (2024); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2023); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); 1st Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudia Arabia (2021); Albertina Modern, Vienna (2020); FRONT Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002); and 4th Site Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2001), among many others.
Morris first met Alexander Kluge when looking for a striking, Wizard-of-Oz-type male voice to record her screenplay. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist introduced her to Kluge, and over the years that followed, their first project developed into a productive collaboration bridging New York, Munich and Berlin.
Bio adapted from König Galerie & White Cube
Irina Simova
Visiting Professor of German Studies, Wesleyan University
Irina Simova is a Visiting Professor of German at Wesleyan University. Her scholarship focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century Germanophone and Eastern European film, literature, and new media in conjunction with ecocritical, affect, and political theory. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with a dissertation that put Alexander Kluge’s work in conversation with French poststructuralism to examine how Kluge’s representations of postwar German history anticipate and complicate theories of contingency, abjection, biopower, and societies of control. A version of the dissertation’s second chapter appeared earlier in the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch as “Adjudicating the Self: Anschauung and Abjection in Abschied von gestern” (2019). Together with Richard Langston, Simova edited Crisis and Astonishment (2024), the ninth volume of the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Her own contribution, “‘Multistable’ Realism: Ecocriticism, Necropolitics and Non-Cinema,” examines Kluge’s and Khavn de la Cruz’s films Happy Lamento and Orphea.
Joseph Vogl
Regular Visiting Professor, Princeton University German Department; Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität Berlin
Joseph Vogl was Professor of German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin (until 2023) and is Regular Visiting Professor at Princeton University. Recent monographs in English: On Tarrying (2011), The Specter of Capital (2014), The Ascendancy of Finance (2017), Capital and Ressentiment (2022), Meteor. An Essay on Floating (upcoming). He was a long-time collaborator of Alexander Kluge: their television conversations date back to 1994, and Kluge and Vogl have co-authored several books, including Soll und Haben (2009) and recently Senkblei der Geschichten (2020).
Kizer S. Walker
Director of Collections, Cornell University Library
Kizer Walker is Director of Collections at Cornell Library and Managing Editor of the book series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought, which is co-published by the Library and Cornell University Press. He also serves as curator of Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue, an openly accessible, online collection of film, television, and video work by Kluge, hosted by Cornell Library. Together with colleagues at Cornell and the University of Bremen, he has been centrally involved in a longstanding collaboration with Kluge to build this resource. Walker publishes on library collections and issues of sustainability and openness in scholarly communications, with a particular focus on publishing practices in the humanities in a time of technological and institutional change. He is the translator of The Arts of Cinema by Martin Seel, among other works. Walker’s current research focuses on the concept of the “atlas” in Kluge’s work, particularly in connection with Kluge’s increasing engagement, in the last decade of his life, with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Walker’s work has appeared in the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch (2021), and he is a contributor to the Alexander Kluge Handbuch (forthcoming from Metzler). He holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University and an M.L.S. from Syracuse University.