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My research focus is on film and media philosophy, visual culture and political theory from early modernism to the present, history of the US-American (moving) image in the 19th and 20th centuries, discourses of pré-cinéma and film archeology, Greek film cultures, intermediality (esp. word-image-relations), and digital humanities.
I studied Comparative Literary and Theater Studies at the University of Munich and completed my PhD in American and Film/Media Studies at the University of Constance. I have held teaching and research positions at the University of Vienna (Professor of Film and Media, tfm Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies), the Ruhr-University Bochum (Visiting Professor of Film Theory and History), the University of Leipzig (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature), and the University of Munich (Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literary Studies; Associate to the Doctoral Program in the Humanities “ProLit”). In addition to several academic grants, I have spent research stays at the Hellenic Institute for Byzantine Studies, Venice, at Princeton University and MIT, Boston. For a detailed academic CV, visit: www.ulrichmeurer.com
I am the author of Topographien. Raumkonzepte in Literatur und Film der Postmoderne (Topographies: Concepts of Space in Postmodern Literature and Film), have edited several books on cinema cultures and published widely on audiovisual media. For a full list of publications and text downloads, visit: http://univie.academia.edu/UlrichMeurer
My current research project Philocracy explores how (moving) images in the U.S. – from mid-19th century daguerreotypes to the introduction of sound film – produce and impart concepts of collective friendship. Combining media history and political theory (the project’s key term refers to post-Nietzschean concepts of the ‘friend’ by Maurice Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze), the project’s case studies discuss the narrative strategies, formal composition and media structure of photo/cinemato/graphic images as agents of a non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal assemblage or ‘governance’ of friends that informs notions of the political from Whitman to the present.