Anke Finger

Professor

German Studies, Media Studies, and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies

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• Director, Graduate Program in German Studies
• Director, DHMS Graduate Certificate, Digital Humanities and Media Studies/Humanities Institute
• Co-Director, EUROBIZ and EUROTECH
• Courtesy Joint Appointment, Department of Digital Media and Design
• Affiliated with the Maritime Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy
• Public Outreach Director, Humility and Conviction in Public Life (2016-2019), Humanities Institute

Education

Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) Brandeis University

Personal Website

Areas of Expertise / Research Interests

• German and Comparative Modernism / Avant-Garde / Aesthetics
• Media Studies / Digital Humanities / Multimodal Scholarship
• Humanities Communication / Research Communication
• Intercultural Communication / Intercultural Literary Studies
• Blue Humanities / Environmental Studies

UConn German Studies Media

Newsblog / youtube / German Studies @ UConn

Anke Finger was trained as a comparative modernist in history and literature. She is a specialist on the idea of the total artwork and debates on interart/intermedia in modernism (with a monograph, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne, 2006; and a collection of critical articles, The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, 2011). New modernism projects focus on German Expressionism, with an edited book on Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism (2023), and a second book addressing Expressionism and colonialism.

A co-founder and co-editor (2005-2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, born-digital, open access journal Flusser Studies, Anke Finger’s closely related scholarship in media studies originates from her work on the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser. She co-authored the 2011 Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and she is a member of the Flusser project team (FlusserVision) at Greenhouse Studios.

Comparative cultural studies and media studies also influence her work in intercultural communication. She edited Flusser’s The Freedom of the Migrant and co-edited KulturConfusão: On German-Brazilian Interculturalities (2015). The Conviction Project sought to interconnect intercultural communication and media studies and was part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project (2016-2019).

A symposium on “Radical Futures” in March 20-21, 2021, supported by the Humanities Institute, started Anke Finger’s inquiry into overlaps between media studies, environmental studies and blue humanities. The distinct speakers’ contributions address climate change, environmental media, social justice, and media technologies. Select presentations are available. The symposium featured the Flusser project What If?.

 

Current projects:

• Center for Humanities Communication (supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, 2025)
• “Germany on Campus” Intercultural Symposium + Company Expo, November 14, 2024 (supported by a Collaborative Award from the German Embassy, D.C.)
• NEW Book Series editor: Media Dynamics/Mediendynamiken, Amsterdam University Press (with Angela Krewani, Marburg University)
• AI Odyssey – Human Rights, Science and Technology Group, Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC)
• “Reading Between the Lines: An Interdisciplinary Glossary for Human-Centered AI” and the UCHI AI Working Group
• Columnist for the Austrian literary magazine perspektive (LiteraturUX)
• Red Baltic: A Cold War Report (autoethnography)

New and recent articles:

• “Somaesthetics, Gender, and the Body as Medium in Claire Goll’s Racialized Expressionism.” In Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
• “Manifesto Moments: Conviction, Reasonable Dissent, and ‘Vanguards of the Future’.” In Bias, Belief and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts. Routledge, 2023.
• “Vilém Flusser’s What If? On Designing Radical Futures.” In Theory, Culture & Society, 2023.
• “Design/Shape.” Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. Edited by Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Miller and Rodrigo Martini. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.
• “The Gutenberg Galaxy will be Pixelated or How to Think of Digital Scholarship as The Present. An Advisor’s Perspective.” Shaping the Digital Dissertation. Edited by Virginia Kuhn and Anke Finger. Cambridge, UK: OBP, 2021. 65-82.
• “Autopoetic Processes within the Avant-Gardes: Fragmenting Authorship.” Constructions of Media Authorship. Investigating Aesthetic Practices from Early Modernity to the Digital Age. Edited by Christiane Heibach, Angela Krewani and Irene Schütze. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. 121-130.

New books:

• Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism. Editor (with Julie Shoults). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
• Bias, Belief and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts. Editor (with Manuela Wagner). London: Routledge, Research in Cultural and Media Studies series; 2023. (over 12,000 views and downloads)
• Vilém Flusser: What If? Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images. Editor, with an introduction, and translated (with Kenneth Kronenberg); afterword by Kenneth Goldsmith. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Part of the Greenhouse Studios FlusserVision Project.
• Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities. Editor (with Virginia Kuhn). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. (over 13,000 views and downloads)