Jeffrey Kirkwood
Associate Professor; Director of Graduate Studies
Art History
Background
Jeffrey West Kirkwood’s research and teaching concentrate on theories of media in culture, science, and philosophy. He has written for Critical Inquiry, October, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, Zeitschrift fĂĽr Medien -und Kulturforschung (ZMK), OSMOS, Astra, Idiom, and Jacobin in addition to a number of collected volumes. He is on the advisory board for The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (MAST), a member of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University, and sits on the steering committee for °®¶ą´«Ă˝â€™s Material and Visual Worlds Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence. In 2018 he co-edited and co-wrote the introduction to the first English-language translation of Ernst Kapp's Elements of a Philosophy of Technology for the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series.
During the 2022-23 academic year he was an invited Senior Fellow with the NOMIS Research Project “The New Real: Past, Present, and Future of Computation, and the Ecologization of Cultural Techniques” at the Bauhaus University. He has also been a fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and a fellow twice at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM).
His book Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 (Minnesota, 2022) examines a shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks and pauses that laid the groundwork for digital technologies and revolutionized theories of the human psyche. He is currently working on a book about technical and cultural practices of encryption and their effects on concepts of value and meaning.
Select Publications
- “Ten Theses on Technics,” Technics: Media Technologies in the Digital Age, eds. Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.
- Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
- “From Work to Proof-of-Work: Meaning and Surplus after Blockchain,” Critical Inquiry, 48 (Winter 2022).
- Orit Halpern, Patrick Jagoda, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, and Leif Weatherby, eds. Surplus Data, special issue, Critical Inquiry, 48 (Winter 2022).
- Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, Eds. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: New Perspectives on the Evolutionary History of Culture, by Ernst Kapp, Trans. Lauren K. Wolf. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Posthumanities Series, 2018.
- Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, “Operations of Culture: Ernst Kapp’s Philosophy of Technology,” Grey Room, vol. 72 (Summer 2018): 6-15.
- “Ernst Mach and the Technological Fact of Counterfactuals,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (ZMK), vol. 9, no. 1 (2018): 13-32.
- “The Cinema of Afflictions,” October, 159 (Winter 2017): 37-54.
Education
- PhD, MA, Princeton University
- MA, University of Chicago
Research Interests
- Media theory and history
- Theory and history of the digital
- Psychoanalysis
- Cinema
- Cultural techniques
Teaching Interests
- Media theory
- Aesthetic theory
- Film theory
- History of digital technologies
- Aesthetic theory
Awards
- Senior Fellow in the NOMIS Research Project at Bauhaus University
- Fellow at the Cornell University Society for Humanities
- Fulbright Fellowship
- Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM)
- Harold W. Dodds Fellowship at Princeton University
- Junior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM)