KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

THOMAS ELSAESSER

Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam. Since 2013 he is Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Among his recent books are German Cinema - Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013), Film Theory – An Introduction through the Senses (with Malte Hagener, 2nd revised edition, New York: Routledge, 2015) and Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). His latest book is European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

CHRISTOPH BODE

Christoph Bode was Chair of Modern English Literature at LMU Munich until March 2018 and Visiting Professor at UCLA and at UC Berkeley. He has published 28 books and some 80 scholarly articles. Former president of the German Society for English Romanticism, co-editor of three book series, permanent Fellow of LMU’s Centre for Advanced Studies and of the Academia Europaea, Bode is also the recipient of various research grants, among them a 1 million Euro Advanced Investigator Grant from the ERC for his project on Future Narratives. Bode was the first German Humanities scholar and the first English Studies person in Europe to receive such a grant. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013.

MARIA POULAKI

Maria Poulaki is assistant professor in digital media arts and film studies at University of Surrey, United Kingdom. Her research has approached narrative complexity from the perspective of complexity theory. With a background in psychology and media psychology, Poulaki is further interested in applications of cognitive theory, psychology, and neuroscience to aesthetics, particularly in moving image media. Her work has appeared in various journals and edited volumes, and she has coedited the books Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media (2017), and Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution (2019).