Anke Finger

Professor

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

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• Co-Chair, German Studies Section
• Co-Director, EUROBIZ
• Director, DHMS Graduate Certificate, Digital Humanities and Media Studies/UCHI
• Courtesy Joint Appointment with the Department of Digital Media and Design
• Affiliated with the Maritime Studies Program
• Director of Public Outreach, HCPL, 2017-2019
• Assistant Director, Humanities Institute, 2016-2019 (Founder and Inaugural Director, DHMS)

Education

Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) Brandeis University

Areas of Expertise

• German and Comparative Modernism / Literature and Other Arts / Aesthetics
• Media Studies / Digital Humanities
• Intercultural Communication / Intercultural Literary Studies

UConn German Studies Media

Newsblog / youtube

 

Anke Finger 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 a book on Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism, due out in 2023) and on colonialism.

A co-founder and co-editor (2005-2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, 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 (Flusser Vision) at Greenhouse Studios.

Comparative/interart literature 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 seeks to interconnect intercultural communication and media studies and is part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project (2016-2019).  Currently, she is writing an autoethnography entitled Memoryland: A Cold War Report.

Together with Christoph Ernst (University of Bonn), Anke Finger organized a symposium on “Radical Futures” in March 20-21, 2021, supported by the Humanities Institute. The distinct speakers’ contributions address climate change, environmental media, social justice, and media technologies. Select presentations are available on youtube.

 

 

New Initiative, 2020-2023:

Decolonizing Area Studies: Towards Intercultural Citizenship and Social Justice (with Isabell Sluka and Manuela Wagner). Select presentations are available from the May 2021 Symposium.

 

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. Forthcoming.
• “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:

• Bias, Belief and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts. Editor (with Manuela Wagner). London: Routledge, Research in Cultural and Media Studies series; 2023. (Watch the “Conviction as a Concept of Cultures” presentation, April 2019).
• Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism. Editor (with Julie Shoults). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
• Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities. Editor (with Virginia Kuhn). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. (Watch the March 2022 Timely Topics workshop and the publisher’s video)
• 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.