Stefan Andriopoulos
Stefan Andriopoulos is Professor of German and co-founder of the Center for Comparative Media. His current book project adopts a historical perspective on how the introduction of new technologies has increased the circulation and acceptance of rumors and disinformation, from Gutenberg to QAnon. A programmatic and freely accessible essay was just published in Grey Room under the title "Rumor and Media: On Circulations and Credence (via Kant and Marx)."
His previous book, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books, 2013), analyzes the constitutive role of spiritualism for the history of philosophy and technology. It was named a book of the year in Times Literary Supplement and has also been published in German and Brazilian Portuguese translation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described its readings of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, and Schopenhauer as “persuasive, precise, and elegant.”
Anxieties about the agency of invisible corporate bodies and the supposedly unlimited power of hypnotism are at the center of Andriopoulos' book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2008). It won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts, and has also been published in German and Brazilian Portuguese.
Andriopoulos' articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, English Literary History, American Literature, Representations, Grey Room, New German Critique, and the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift. He has co-edited a special issue of Grey Room entitled “On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare” (2011). Other books, published in German, include a monograph on Accident and Crime: Configurations between Literary and Legal Discourse around 1900 (Centaurus, 1996), and two co-edited volumes, 1929: Contributions to an Archaeology of Media (Suhrkamp, 2002) and Addressing Media (DuMont, 2001).
Stefan Andriopoulos has served as chair of Columbia’s Department of Germanic languages, and he has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, in the Department of the History of Science, at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and at Cologne University. He received the Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award for his teaching, research, and mentoring, and he serves as a contributing editor of New German Critique.
