Body and Media

The Body and Media research group participates in the shift of focus to corporeality and mediation across disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a shift often perceived as a reaction to the discourse-centered, psychoanalytic-linguistic approach prominent in literary, film, cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s. With participants working on different specific time periods, cultures, media, and genres, this group adopts a transhistorical and comparative approach to the study of the relationships between body and media. It asks broad questions concerning the relationship between mind and body, mediation and immediacy, virtuality and actuality, human and nonhuman actants, questions that preoccupy fields as varied as philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, performance studies, animal studies, science and technology studies, feminism and queer theories, and critical race theories.