Biographies

 

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Evelyn Annuß, Professor of Gender Studies, heads the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (IGCP) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Her work is dedicated to the flight lines of aesthetics, theories of performativity, and the critique of politics. As a cultural studies scholar of theatre and literature, she focuses, among other things, on political spectacles—their historicity and mediality—in the context of National Socialism, colonial racisms, and processes of (re-)fascization. Her new book Dirty Dragging. Performative Transpositions is being published simultaneously in German and in English by mdwPress.

Sam Ehrentraut is a research associate and a doctoral candidate in the FWF project Dramaturgies after Postdramatic Theater at the Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. He is also affiliated with the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities (Free University of Berlin), where he organizes collaborative formats that bring academic and artistic perspectives into dialogue. His research focuses on performative dynamics of time-based media, media ontologies, and aesthetic concepts in the field of trans studies.

Nanna Heidenreich is a media and cultural studies scholar and a curator for film/video/interventions. She is currently Professor of Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, after positions in universities, art and film schools in Düsseldorf, Köln, Hildesheim and Braunschweig. As a curator, she has worked with Forum Expanded / International Filmfestival Berlin (Berlinale) and HKW (Berlin) among others. Her work focuses on critical migration studies, postcolonial media theory, image politics and queer cinema. Current research areas are age/rage, the relation of fascism and aesthetics, and so called “alien species”. She lives in Berlin and Vienna.

Elaine Frantz is a historian of violence in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. Her work focuses on particular historical conflicts characterized by systemic violence, and considers the function and results of this violence, and how contemporaries—perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and the broader public—themselves described and responded to these acts of violence. She has published books on the reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and on nineteenth-century male drinking culture, and is now finishing a book on policing in Pittsburgh, with the working title: “Just a Copper”: Policing Pittsburgh 1869—1934.

Aurélie Godet is a Full Professor of U.S. History at Nantes Université, France, and a junior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France for the 2023—2028 period. After working on the history and ascendency of conservative movements and ideas in the United States between 2005 and 2014, she pivoted to a new research topic in 2015: the history of festive practices in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century to the contemporary period. She recently completed a manuscript titled Betwixt Fear and Hardship: Joy in French Colonial Louisiana, 1682—1769, and currently sits on the editorial board of the online, peer-reviewed Journal of Festive Studies, which she cofounded in 2019.

Katrin Köppert is an art and media scholar. Her work focuses on media theories of digital colonialism, critical theories of computation, post-/decolonial media theories of the Anthropocene at the intersection of art, design, and visual cultures, digital memory studies, queer media aesthetics. She currently holds the professorship for media theory at the Institute for Music and Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and is a Junior Professor of Art History/Popular Cultures at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. She has recently published the co-edited book digital:gender—de:mapping affect (Spector Books, 2025) and is now writing a book on Computational Blackface.

Karin Harrasser is the director of ifk International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna and a Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Arts Linz. In addition to her academic activities, she has been involved in various artistic and curatorial projects, e. g. at Tanzquartier Wien or with MAPA Teatro and the Colombian Truth Commission in Bogotá. Her research currently focuses on asymmetrical cultural transfers between Europe and South America and on modes and histories of cultural violence. Recent books: Surazo. Monika und Hans Ertl: Eine deutsche Geschichte in Bolivien (2022), translated into Spanish and Brazilian, and Gegenentkommen (2023).

Julia Ostwald is a dance scholar and postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-project OLFAC. Exploring the Intervening Performativity of Smell at the University of Arts Linz (AT). Situated at the intersections of dance theory, performance studies, and cultural history, her research focuses on the entanglements of sensual perceptions, aesthetics, and (body-)politics in the context of dance and choreography. Julia previously worked as a senior scientist in gender studies at mdw-University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and as a project assistant at the doctoral school gender_transcultural at Salzburg University.