Research Projects

This project engages with the longstanding prominence of paranormal and conspiratorial ideas in US-American culture and politics, arguing that they are not fringe phenomena, but products of the modern mass media and their capacity to inject such ideas into mainstream political discourse. It argues further that the acceptance of these ideas is centrally related to the mass media’s function in providing background knowledge that allows for the imagination of a shared social reality. More precisely, the project suggests that the conceptual building blocks of these worldviews are provided by mass-media products existing in the liminal space between news and entertainment, fact and fiction, empirically verifiable truth and creative fabulation – in hoaxes, factually incorrect reporting, political disinformation, and conspiracy theories circulated by news media, but also in speculative, but putatively non-fictional reports of paranormal phenomena and openly fictional in science-fiction tales of alien visitors and sinister conspiracies that present themselves as grounded in scientific or historical fact. It further argues that the liminal status of such narratives – between fact and fiction, between news reporting and outright fabrication – should be understood as an aspect of the modern mass media’s role in the construction of reality and its frequent failures to consistently demarcate the boundaries between news and entertainment. Adopting a historical perspective, the project suggests that this failure of demarcation is best understood as the product of the mass media as an evolving social system that first emerged in the early 19th century.

Against this background, the project examines the period between the early 1830s and the late 1890s, focusing on disruptive formats and discourse that troubled the distinction between fact and fiction in different ways. Case studies include famous newspaper hoaxes published in the 1840s, antisemitic, anti-masonic, and anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and their echo in the popular press, antebellum rumors of revolts led by the enslaved population in the Southern States and their impact on political discourse, the rise of news photography during the Civil War, the traffic between esoteric and paranormal discourses and widely popular literary works, and the appearance of popular science and proto-science-fiction magazines between 1880 and 1900 (which often blurred the line between the reporting of facts and inventive fabulation). To varying extents, all these case studies operate in a liminal space between fact and fiction – containing made-up claims but insisting on their (partial or complete) factuality. Beyond this, the case studies condense, appropriate, popularize, and occasionally originate ideas and tropes that already are (or later become) staples of putatively non-fictional political discourses. Tracking the historical trajectory of this dynamic, the project thus argues that popular narratives in the liminal space between fact and fiction are particularly apt at inserting paranormal and conspiratorial ideas into mainstream culture and political discourse – and that their study can shed new light on how the mass media has historically played an important role in shaping the US-American political imaginary.

2018-2021

The sub-project examines the ways in which mass-addressed print media from the four decades around the turn to the 20th century participated in a practical organization of readers' free time and recreational activities. In particular, the project zooms in on the role of newspapers and considers the interplay of their contents and characteristic medial aspects (such as publication schedules, page format and layout, practices of serialization) to interrogate how the periodical media of industrial modernity intervened in the everyday lives of consumers. In doing so, the project starts from the assumption that the period's Taylorist reorganization of the factory and the scientific management of work were accompanied by a mass-cultural management of consumers' leisure time that proceeded through the temporal routines of the modern mass media. In the case of periodical print media, this project involved not only the daily rhythm of newspapers and the divergent schedules of other (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) publications, but also formats such as the Sunday supplement, whose colorful and cultured contents symbolically demarcated the free time of the weekend as distinct from the pressures of the workweek. By featuring a regularly recurring mix of contents that ranged from comics to long essays, to practical advice, to entertainment for children, Sunday supplements invited the adoption of ritualized reception practices that produced larger (regional and national) communities of readers. Beyond their productivity for such processes of "collective serialization" (Denson/Sudmann), however, the diverse contents of periodical media like the Sunday supplement also participated in a modern broadening of consumption choices, diversification of lifestyles, and other modes of cultural and social distinction. In inviting a number of different reading practices—such as quick browsing, deliberative contemplation, or attentive re-reading—the same contents furthermore established their own distinct temporalities and thereby complicated the synchronization effects of periodical print media. Engaging with these aspects of mass-cultural synchronization and desynchronization, the sub-project uses the study of newspaper supplements and their carrier media as a prism through which the larger routines and mechanisms of an emergent culture-industrial constellation of industrial modernity become accessible.

2013-2018

My dissertation examines the wave of superhero blockbuster movies released in the twenty-year period between 1998 and 2018 and inquires how the specific aesthetic practice of this type of film—i.e. their investment in complex modes of serial and transmedial storytelling, their strategic courting of fan audiences and their structurally conservative thematic preoccupations, as well as their presentation of state-of-the-art visual spectacle—becomes productive for the current prominence and popularity of the genre. Centrally, it argues that superhero blockbusters films are emblematic for popular culture in the age of cognitive capitalism. Superhero blockbusters, in other words, are prime examples of a type of commercial popular culture that seeks to engage audiences over longer periods of time, attempts to exploit the ‘free labor’ of culturally productive media fans for promotional gain, and generally encourages public debate about its products. To make this case, the dissertation tracks the evolution of the genre’s storytelling strategies through the decades, examines how online marketing and PR campaigns for films like Logan, Deadpool, and Suicide Squad align themselves with the respective films’ aesthetics, and considers the cinematic populism of superhero blockbusters like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, its sequel Civil War or V for Vendetta. Finally, it suggests that the politics of these films cannot be disconnected from the ways in which they engage their viewers—and that contemporary superhero blockbuster cinema touts the values of “participatory culture” in order to capitalize on the culturally, socially, and textually productive work of other actors