Faculty Overview

Giorgio Agamben, Phd.,: Baruch Spinoza Chair at EGS, is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy and teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. As Post-Doc he participated in seminars with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg and directed the Italian Walter Benjamin Edition. Agamben's unique blending of literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art makes him one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. He was a visiting professor in Paris and taught at American universities such as UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Northwestern.

Chantal Akerman, a Brussels-born and now Paris-based filmmaker, is world famous for her deconstructive style, pessimistic humor and corrosive observations of identity, sexuality, and politics. Akerman’s films have been called the single most important and coherent body of work by a women director, and her film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975) was praised by the “New York Times as ”the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema”. In addition to her many short and feature films, Chantal Akerman has produced documentaries and video installations some of them were exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale and Kassel Documenta

Pierre Alferi was born in France in 1963 and currently lives in Paris. Alferi began his writing career with philosophical essays: Guillaume dÕOckham, Le singulier and Chercher une phrase. He now writes poetry and has published several books of poetry, including Les Allures naturelles (1991), Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif (1992), Kub Or (1994), and Sentimentale journée (1997), as well as two novels, Fmn (1994) and Le cinéma des familles (1999). Recently he has been working in short film and video (Films parlants/Ciné-poèmes, DVD, 2003). Alferi often collaborates with Suzanne Doppelt, a photographer and professor at EGS, with whom he started a literary journal called Détail. He has also translated one of Giorgio Agamben's works into French.

Hubertus von Amelunxen, Ph.D.,: Walter Benjamin Chair at EGS, is Founding Director and Professor at the International School for New Media in Luebeck (Germany) and Senior Visiting Curator for Photography and New Media at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (Canada). Longtime editor of FOTOGESCHICHTE, a leading journal, Amelunxen is an internationally recognized philosopher of photography in the age of media with cross-disciplinary interests and as innovative curator. Former professor of cultural studies at Muthesius-Hochschule Kiel (Germany), he was visiting professor at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts Antwerp, the University of Dusselforf (Germany), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness Program). Author of Die aufgehobene Zeit; Allegory and Photography; Photography after Phtography (ed.); Television and Revolution; Theorie der Photographie IV;

Pierre Aubenque, Ph.D.,: Aristoteles Chair at EGS, professor emeritus (Sorbonne), is an internationally recognized authority on Western philosophy and serves as secretary general of the Institute international de Philosophie (Paris). At the European Graduate School Aubenque is the philosopher-in-residence and member of the Scientific Council.

Alain Badiou, Ph.D: Rene Descartes Chair at EGS, born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Alain Badiou was a student at the école Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chaire of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan …) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the centre of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Nicholson Baker, born January 7, 1957, is a celebrated novelist whose main works concern the thoughts of characters during otherwise inconsequential moments. His first work, Mezzanine, takes place through the memories of an office worker as he ascends an escalator. His novel Vox, about a sex phone conversation, was briefly a media sensation after it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to President Bill Clinton. Baker is also an activist for the protection and archival of newspapers. His campaign arose after he discovered that many major libraries destroy the paper originals once a microfilm copy has been made. This discovery prompted Baker to write Double Fold, a book that has received a great deal of media attention.

Judith Balso, Ph.D. (Marc Bloch University - Strasbourg, 1997), is a professor of poetry at the European Graduate School. Each semester Balso brings a different poet to EGS. Judith Balso authored: Pessoa, le passeur métaphysique, Le Portugal de près : Textes et documents (Yenan), and Pessoa (Les conférences du Perroquet). Her intellectual work revolves around a study of the Portuguese poet, Ferdinando Pessoa. She is also active politically.

Lewis Baltz is an American photographer, Paris and Venice-based, and is a Professor in the School of Visual Arts, at the IUAV. He became influential as part of the "New Topography" movement of the late Seventies. Baltz realized a "counter aesthetics" by revealing with a dispassionate eye desolate landscapes and forgotten places. Baltz studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate Schoolin 1971. Currently Baltz works on information architecture day, exposing the crisis of technology. His works have been exhibited world-wide in museums such as The Museum of Modern Art Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, San Francisco MOMA, Los Angeles MOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art New York. Publications: The New Industrial Parks; San Quentin Point; Candlestick Point; Rule without Exception; Deaths in Newport; Politics of Bacteria, Docile Bodies, Ronde de Nuit.

John Perry Barlow was born and raised in Wyoming. In 1969, Barlow graduated with High Honors in Comparative Religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Barlow is a former Grateful Dead lyricist and current co-founder and co-chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF is one of the leading nonprofit organizations dedicated to protecting "digital freedom". In 1997, Barlow was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics. He is currently a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School.

Jean Baudrillard, notorious French sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity, was born in 1929 in the northern town of Reims. Son of civil servants and grandson of peasant farmers, Baudrillard was the first in his family to attend university, was an ex- university sociology teacher, and a leading intellectual figure of his time. His early life was influenced by the Algerian war in the 1950s and 60s. He taught German in a Lycée before completing his doctoral thesis in sociology under the tuition of Henri Lefebvre. He then became an Assistant in September 1966 at Nanterre University of Paris X. He was associated with Roland Barthes, to whose semiotic analysis of culture his first book, The Object System (1968) is clearly indebted. He was also influenced by Marshall McLuhan who demonstrated the importance of the mass media in any sociological overview.

Marcel Beyer (born 23 November 1965 in Tailfingen, Württemberg) is a German poet and novelist. Beyer has been named one of the best young European novelists by the New Yorker. Two of his books, Spies and The Kranau Tapes, have been translated into English. He has published many books in German including a translation of Gertrude Stein's work. He is well known for his 'idiosyncratic' perspective on the German Nazi period.

Yve-Alain Bois: Roland Barthes Chair at EGS, is Joseph Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art and Chair, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Ph.D. (Paris University) where he studied under Roland Barthes. Co-Editor of the Journal October, a curator and noted philosopher of art. Contributing editor to Artforum. Organizer (with Rosalind Krauss) of the exhibition Formless at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Author of Painting as Model; Formless; Matisse and Picasso.

Catherine Breillat is a Paris based filmmaker and writer who became famous for her distinctively personal films on sexuality, gender trouble and sibling rivalry. Accused of being a 'porno auteuriste', Breillat allowed for an unbiased view of sexuality and extended the language of mainstream movies. She is also a best-selling novelist and wrote her first novel, L'Homme Facile, at the age of 17. Breillat acted in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1982) and wrote the screenplay for Maurice Pialat's movie Police (1984). Since her first film Une vraie jeune filles (1975, not released before 2000), Breillat explored critically as well as innovatively the perceptions imposed on female sexuality, related family and coming of age issues. Major films: Virgin (36 Fillette), Perfect Love, Romance, Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy.

Victor Burgin, M.F.A. (Yale), is Millard Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. One of the most distinguished teaching artists of our time whose cross-disciplinary work bridges media, culture and art. Former Chair in Art and Architecture, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, and Professor of Art History, UC Santa Cruz, Burgin served as visiting professor and artist-in-residence in many countries. His media and conceptual art was exhibited in museums and art galleries worldwide. Author of Thinking Photography, Between, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Shadowed.

Judith Butler: Hannah Arendt Chair at EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sophie Calle is an artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiousity. Calle made a piece called 'Suite Venitienne' in which she followed a man she had met at a party in Hurstville and continued to follow and photograph him there for two weeks. In another, The Hotel Room, she made a piece of work about her imagined ideas of who the hotel guests were, based on their personal belongings For each room there was a photograph of the bed undone, of other objects in the room, and a description day by day of what I found there."

Hélène Cixous was born on June 5, 1937, in Oran, Algeria. Her father was a French-colonialist, and died while Cixous was young. Her mother was Austro-German, and German was Cixous' first language. Members of her family were Jewish, including her father, and the atrocities of World War II had an early influence on her. Cixous studied English literature, especially Shakespeare, and read mythology and the German romantics including Heinrich von Kleist. From early in her life she has studied literature in many languages, reading authors like Franz Kafka, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Clarice Lispector.

David Cronenberg (March 15, 1943 -) was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he currently lives. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in literature. Cronenberg is a well known film director who began making films in 1969. His most well known films include Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, and A History of Violence. His films often concern questions of bodily transformation and infection and he is credited with originating the genre of "body horror".

Diane Davis PhD.: Kenneth Burke Chair at EGS, is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin. Recognized for her ability to apply esthetical and ethical concepts of postmodern philosophy, literary theory and rhetoric to “writing with electricity” and new media phenomena. Author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter

Michel Deguy, born in Paris in 1930, expands the concept of poetry. Winner of the Prix Mallarme and the Grand Prix National de la Poesie, he is currently professor of French literature at the Universite de Paris VII (Saint-Denis); the Director of Po&Sie (Editions Belin), the major French journal of poetry and poetics; the Editor of Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Sartre; and the former president of the College International de Philosophie. He is also active as a translator of, among others, Heidegger, Gongora, Sappho, Dante, and various American poets.

Manuel DeLanda: Gilles Deleuze Chair at EGS, is a New York based philosopher and science writer with an exceptionally cross-disciplinary body of work: He has written extensively on nonlinear dynamics, theories of self-organization, artificial life and intelligence, chaos theory as well as architecture, and history of science. Currently, DeLanda is a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University, New York. Born in Mexico City he moved to New York in 1975 and became an independent filmmaker. In 1980 he turned his attention towards the computer, a pioneer programmer and computer art, before he emerged as one of the leading theorists of the electronic world. Major books: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines; A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History; Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.

Claire Denis is a Paris-based filmmaker internationally recognized for her fearless investigation of the human condition with its cross-cultural tensions and family troubles. Denis is a graduate of IDHEC, the French Film School, and served as assistant to Jacques Rivette, Costa-Gavras, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders. Her debut feature film Chocolat

Suzanne Doppelt is a contemporary French writer, editor and photographer based in Paris, who studied and taught philosophy and literature, before she developed an interest in photography. She has exhibited at numerous venues, including New York University’s Deutsches Haus; Centre Culturel Français, Damas; Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nîmes; Pavillon des arts, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Galerie Pennings in Holland. Among her publications are several books which combine images and text including Totem, a book of mock-ethnology, La 4e des plaies vole (2004), which looks at flies, the 4th Biblical Plague, Quelque chose cloche, OXO, a photographic collaboration with Pierre Alferi and RING, RANG, WRONG.

Atom Egoyan was born July 19, 1960 in Cairo, Egypt to Armenian parents. Egoyan moved to Canada early in his life, first living in Victoria, British Columbia with his family and then moving to Toronto at age 18 to study international relations at the University of Toronto. Egoyan is a well known and highly talented director who has made dozens of films. His films often explore the way human relationships are corrupted by the omnipresence of technology. Aside from teaching at the European Graduate School, Egoyan is also a faculty member of the University of Toronto. In 1999, Egoyan was awarded Canada's highest civilian recognition: Officer of the Order of Canada.

Tracey Emin is a London based artist internationally known for her autobiographical art. She was born in London in 1963, and attended the Royal College of Art which she left in 1998 with a Master of Art in Paintings. She studied modern philosophy in London and was on the short list for the Turner Prize in 1999. In her multimedia work she uses sewing, neons, videos, Super-8 films, photographs watercolors and is also a compulsive writer. Emin's art is highly confessional, for she makes her life known as well as her beliefs and her feelings. Her life and art are inextricably entwined. Her work is a controlled exhibition of the self: often tragic, sometimes funny. David Bowie called Emin “William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh”, critics describe her art as ”full of passion and striving and liveliness” with a ”raw openness”.

Bracha L. Ettinger, Ph.D., Marcel Duchamp Chair & Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at EGS. Artist and groundbreaking theoretician working at the intersection of feminine sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.Her approach significantly extends the work of contemporary philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Deleuze-Guattari and Jacques Lacan, and challenges the works of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Her "matrixial" theory and language has aesthetical, analytic, ethical and political implications.

Christopher Fynsk,: Maurice Blanchot Chair at EGS, Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy, and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Binghamton. Ph.D.(John Hopkins). An internationally recognized Heidegger scholar and literary theorist who has worked with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy at the University of Strasbourg. Author of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity; Language and Relation; Infant Figures.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art.

A trained painter, the Amsterdam and London based Peter Greenaway PhD. is one of the great film directors of our time, an innovative curator and a challenging philosopher of cinema. His multi-media approach surpasses traditional media forms and aims at a visual language in its own right. His films include The Falls; The Belly of an Architect; The Draughtman's Contract; Drowning By Numbers; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Prospero's Books; The Baby of Mâcon; The Pillow Book; Eight and a Half Women.

Durs Grünbein (born on October 9, 1962) grew up in the former East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Grünbein became one of the most significant writers, poets, and voices of the reunified Germany. His work has been awarded many German literary prizes, including the highest, the Georg-Büchner-Preis (1995) and the Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry. Grünbein was Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College and became the first chair of poetry at the Academy of Fine Arts at Düsseldorf. His work, including contributions to catalogues and a libretto for opera, several essay collections and new translations of plays from antiquity, has been translated into many languages.

Werner Hamacher: Emmanuel Levinas Chair at EGS, PhD, is Professor for General and Comparative Literature at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. A leading critical thinker in the tradition of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, renowned for his bridging of literature, philosophy, and politics, Hamacher was previously Professor of German and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Editor of the series Meridian — Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford University Press) and author of Pleroma: Reading in Hegel; Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan; Entferntes Verstehen; Nietzsche aus Frankreich (ed).

Barbara Hammer (born May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California) is a lesbian filmmaker. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 30 years. Hammer is considered a pioneer of queer cinema for having made the world's first lesbian films in 1974 (Dyketactics) and 1976 (Women I Love). Her feature length films include Lover Other (2006) and Resisting Paradise (2003). Hammer lives in New York City.

Donna Haraway likens "cyborg" to the political identity of "women of color," which "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (ibid). The "Cyborg" though, is grounded in "political-scientific" analysis. This analysis takes up most of the manifesto.

Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. His most famous work is Empire written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to Empire, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude as the site of a global democratic movement. Hardt worked with NGOs in Central America, doing tasks like bringing donated computers from the U.S. and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. In 1983, he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature at the University of Washington. Hardt received his M.A. in 1986 and his PhD in 1990. He then went to Paris where he met Negri, beginning their collaborative relationship soon after. Hardt speaks French and Italian, and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University.

Martin Hielscher, Ph.D. (University of Hamburg): Theodor W. Adorno Chair at EGS, translator, critic, author who has lectured internationally on modern literature and philosophy (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Critical Theory, media philosophy) and creative writing. Currently managing editor for literature at Beck Verlag Münich, former editor for German literature at Kiepenheuer & Witsch Publishers in Cologne, Germany. Visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis, 1998 and at Leipzig University, 2000. Translated William Gaddis, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Charles Johnson, Nuruddin Farah into German. Author of Zitierte Moderne, Wolfgang Koeppen, Beckmann lernt schiessen, Fluchtort Mexiko.

Michel Houellebecq is a Dublin and Lanzarote based French author whose style is praised as a blending of Flaubert, Balzac, and Camus. Born on the isle of Reunion, Houellebecq worked as computer administrator in Paris before he became the “pop star of the single generation”. The Elementary Particles (Atomized)

Shelley Jackson, (born 1963), MFA (Brown University), is a San Francisco writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her groundbreaking work of hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl (1995), My Body (1997), and The Doll Games (with Pamela Jackson, 2001). Jackson is the author of two children's books: The Old Woman and The Wave (1998) and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog (2001), a short story collection: The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002) and a novel: Half Life (2006). Shelley Jackson currently teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School in New York City.

Claude Lanzmann is a Paris based filmmaker and director of the prestigious magazine Les Temps Modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lanzmann is renowned for his unprecedented "cinematic history of the Holocaust," the 9 ½ hour documentary film SHOAH (1985) which focuses on the voices and faces of the victims, victimizers and other participants. He studied philosophy at Tübingen University in Germany and in Paris where he graduated with a Diplomé d'Etudes Supérieures de Philosophie; he was lecturer for French literature annd philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. Lanzmann belonged to the circle of the French philosophers Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir and as journalist his specialty became in-depth interviews. Other documentary films are Why Israel (1974), Tsahal (1994), A Visitor from the Living (1997). Solibor / 1943/ 4pm (2001). Author of The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film SHOAH.

Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return to Beijing he became one of the first group of young 'underground' poets, who published the literary magazine Jintian. Yang Lian's poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his poem Norlang was criticized by the Chinese government during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution movement.

Geert Lovink (born 1959, Amsterdam) is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Lovink earned his master's degree in political science at the University of Amsterdam, holds a PhD at the University of Melbourne on the Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture and became the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. Lovink authored: Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002), My First Recession (2003), The Principle of Notworking (2005), New Media, Art and Science (2005), Tactical Media, the Second Decade (2005), Dawn of the Organized Networks (2005) and Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (2007).

Greg Lynn (born 1964), is an American architect, philosopher, and science-fiction writer. He is well known for his architectural design of irregular, biomorphic architectural forms. TIME magazine has named Lynn one of the top 100 innovators. He lives and works in Venice, California.

Colum McCann M.A., professor of contemporary literature and writer-in-residence at EGS. The Irish award-winning author is based in New York where he teaches creative writing at Hunter College. Author of Everything in this Country Must, This Side of Brightness; Dancer; Zoli.

Carl Mitcham,: Hans Jonas Chair at EGS, Professor of Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines. Ph.D. (Fordham). One of the leading American philosophers of technology with emphasis on ethics. Former philosophy professor and director, Science-Technology-Society Program, Pennsylvania State University; founding director, Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University, New York; president, Society for Philosophy and Technology. Mitcham is the editor of Philosophy of Technology Reader; Philosophy and Technology II; Ethics and Technology. Author of Technology and Religion; Thinking Through Technology; Social and Philosophical Construction of Technology; Engineering Ethics.

Jean Luc Nancy: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair at EGS, was born on the 26th of July 1940 in Caudéran, near Bordeaux in France. Shortly after he obtained his graduate in philosophy in 1962 in Paris, Nancy began to publish. His work is from the beginning marked by diverse influences, from Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to Descartes, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. These authors are already evident in the very first books that Nancy published: Le discours de la syncope (1976) and L'impératif catégorique (1983) on Kant, La remarque spéculative (translated as The Speculative Remark, 2001) on Hegel, Ego sum (1979) on Descartes and Le partage des voix (1982) on Heidegger. In the seventies and eighties he became a guest professor at many universities, from the Freie Universität in Berlin to the University of California. As a professor in philosophy, he was also involved in many cultural delegations of the French ministry of external affairs, particularly in relation to Eastern Europe, Great-Britain and the United States of America.

Gaspar Noé is the son of the famous Argentine painted Luis Felipe Noé. He currently works in France. Noé's films contain graphic and intensive violence, a feature that has attracted considerable controversy. His most famous film is Irreversible, a reverse chronologically told story of a revenge killing. The film utilizes sound effects to induce a feeling of anxiety and disease in the audience. It also contains an 8 minute rape scene.

Cornelia Parker Cornelia Parker, is a London-based sculptor and installation artist internationally recognized for her multi-layered irony which favors "exploded" views, cartoon deaths and "inhaling-exhaling". Parker studied art and received her MFA at Reading University in 1982, an honorary doctorate from University of Wolverhamptonin 2000. A Turner Prize nominated artist in 1997, Parker is renowned for her site-specific work which exist only for that time and place, such as Edge of England

Stephen and Timothy Quay (born June 17, 1947 in Norristown, Pennsylvania) are identical twins whose collaborative stop-motion animations are extremely well known. They attended art school in Philadelphia and London. They now live and work in England. The Quay Brothers create films that are often called surreal and that usually involve inanimate objects coming to life. They have made dozens of short films along with two feature length films.

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who first came to prominence when he co-authored "Reading Capital" (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Rancière later split with his mentor, Althusser, over the proper response to the student revolt of May 1968. Today, Rancière is most well known for his aesthetic philosophy and books on democracy.

Laurence Arthur Rickels is a Professor in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at the University of California - Santa Barabara. He received his PhD in German Studies from Princeton University in 1980 and has been teaching at UCSB since 1990. Rickels' interests are in the intersections between psychoanalysis, technology and Nazis. Author of Aberrations of Mourning (1988), Der unbetrauerbare Tod (1990), The Case of California (1991), and The Vampire Lectures (1999), and editor of Looking After Nietzsche (1990), Gottfried Keller's Jugenddramen (1990), and Acting Out in Groups (1999). He is most well known for his three-volume study, Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002).

Avital Ronell was born in Prague. Her parents were Israeli diplomats who returned to Israel before going to New York. Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches German and comparative literature and theory—in addition to her yearly Fall semester seminar with Derrida—and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of deconstructive rereadings of everything from technology, the Gulf War, and AIDS, to opera, addiction, and stupidity.

Wolfgang Schirmacher,: Arthur Schopenhauer Chair at EGS, Ph.D., Program Director of Media and Communication at EGS. An internationally active philosopher of technology with emphasis on media, gene technology, and neuroscience, president of the International Schopenhauer Association, and chair, Artificial Life Group. Former Core Faculty Member of the Media Studies Graduate Program, New School for Social Research, and Director of International Relations, Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University, New York. Editor of Schopenhauer-Studien and New York Studies in Media Philosophy.

Michael Schmidt, Ph.D. (University of Freiburg): John Cage-Chair at EGS, studied piano and did his doctoral work in musicology. He is currently an editor of music programming with Bavarian Radio Station, Münich, and teaches "Strategies for the Media Future of Music" at the Graduate School of Music in Karlsruhe (Germany). Author of "Ekstase als musikalisches Symbol", "Hat Musik ein Geschlecht?", " Von der Interpretation zur Simulation", "Die Pornographie der schönen Stellen", "Polyphony of the Beautiful Channels", "Terror Aestheticized and the Technique of Music", "Music as Media", "Musical Expression and Digital Media", "Musical Fusion in the Age of Media"

Hendrik Speck, Ph.D. (ABD): Ada Byron Chair at EGS, is a Professor of Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern / Department of Computer Sciences/ Interactive Media and head of the Information Architecture/ Search Engine Laboratory. He taught and lectured at the International School of New Media, European Graduate School, New School for Social Research and Columbia University.

Paul D. Miller is a New York based musician, conceptual artist, and writer best known under his "constructed persona" as "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid". He was the first editor at large of "Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts", and his articles have appeared in The Village Voice, Artforum, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, The Source, and many other magazines and journals. His art work is based employs a wide variety of digitally create music and multi-media to create a form of post-modern sculpture in the tradition of composers such as John Cage and Afrika Bambaata. He has collaborated with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Killa Priest of Wu-Tang Clan, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth amongst many others. Miller's artistic work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial for Architecture (year 2000), the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, Kunsthalle, Vienna, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an Austin based American science fiction author and net critic, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre. Sterling is internationally recognized as cyberspace theorist and teaches at the European Graduate School and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he became "visionary in residence". His novels Involution Ocean; The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix; Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather influenced the cyberpunk literary movement.

Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone Ph.D.: Wolfgang Köhler Chair at EGS, and is the Wolfgang Köhler Professor, department of Radio-TV-Film, and Director, Advanced Communication Technology Lab, University of Texas at Austin. Director of the Group for the Study of Visual Systems at the Center of Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz. A performance artist, researcher in neurology and anthropologist of the virtual world, she has organized several international conferences on cyberspace in Santa Cruz, Austin, Banff/Canada, and Karlsruhe, Germany, between 1991-1995. Author of The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.

Elia Suleiman (born July 28, 1960 in Nazareth, Palestine) is a Palestinian filmmaker whose most well known work is Divine Intervention, a surreal comedy about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Suleiman lived in New York City for a decade before moving back to Palestine to teach Film and Media at Birzeit University in Jerusalem.

Margarethe von Trotta (born February 21, 1942) is one of the foremost German film directors and a member of the New German Cinema movement. She has directed over a dozen films including: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann) 1975, Coup de Grâce 1976, Das Zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages 1978, Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks 1979, Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit) 1981, Heller Wahn 1983, Rosa Luxemburg 1986, Felix 1987, Fürchten und Lieben 1988, Paura e amore 1988, L'Africana/Die Rückkehr 1990, Il Lungo silenzio/Zeit des Zorns 1993, Das Versprechen (The Promise) 1995, Winterkind 1997 (TV), Mit fünfzig küssen Männer anders 1998 (TV), Dunkle Tage 1999 (TV), Jahrestage/Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cressphal 2000 (mini) TV Series, Rosenstrasse 2003, Die Andere Frau 2004 (TV), Ich bin die Andere 2006.

Friedrich Ulfers is Associate Professor of German at New York University. Over the years he has served a variety of administrative functions, such as the Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of the NYU in Berlin summer program and, most recently, Director of Deutsches Haus at NYU. Winner of NYU's Distinguished Teaching Medal and Great Teacher Award, and three times winner of the College of Arts and Science's Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching, he has taught not only in the German Department but also in NYU's interdisciplinary programs, offering courses that engage a range of interdisciplinary interests, including literary theory, continental philosophy, and the relationships between science, literature, and philosophy. His specific teaching and research interests are German Romanticism and 19th/20th German literature (with particular emphasis on Nietzsche and Kafka).

Gregory Ulmer, Ph.D.: Joseph Beuys Chair at EGS, Professor, English Department, University of Florida. Authority on electracy and cyberlanguage who initiated hypertextual practices such as "fetishturgy," "choragraphy" and "mystoriography." Author of Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys; Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video; Heuretics: The Logic of Invention.

Agnés Varda (born 30 May 1928) is a Paris-based French film director, a key figure in modern film history and one of the world's leading filmmakers. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style. For the 1985 documentary-style feature film Vagabond/Without Roof or Rule she received the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival. Major films: Cleo from 5 to 7; Happiness; One Sings, The Other Doesn't; Kung-Fu Masters; Jacquot de Nantes; One Hundred and One Nights; The Gleaners and I.

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to a Breton mother and an Italian Communist father. Virilio was evacuated in 1939 to the port of Nantes, where he was traumatised by the spectacle of Hitler's Blitzkrieg during World War II. After training at the Ecole des Metiers d' Art in Paris, Virilio became an artist in stained glass and worked alongside Matisse in various churches in the French capital. In 1950, he converted to Christianity in the company of 'worker-priests.' Under military conscription into the colonial army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), he studied architecture in Paris.

Victor J. Vitanza: Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair at EGS, is Professor of English and Rhetoric at Clemson University, where he is Director of the Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communications, and Information Design (RCID). Editor of PRE/TEXT: a journal of rhetorical theory, and the Director of the PRE://TEXT Publishing Webwork. Internationally recognized as "the bad boy of American rhetoric", Vitanza brings together classical and modern rhetorical theory with contemporary French and Italian philosophy. Publications: Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric; Writing Histories of Rhetoric; CyberReader.

Samuel Weber, Ph.D.,: Paul de Man Chair at EGS, is the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and one of the leading American thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Weber has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory. Weber was trained under Paul de Man and served as dramaturgue at German opera houses and theaters (Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf). Weber translated Adorno and Derrida, and his groundbreaking work “Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis” was written in German. He was visiting professor at many universities in France and German and taught at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Publications: Unwrapping Balzac; The Legend of Freud; Institution and Interpretation; Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media

Lebbeus Woods, born 1940 in Lansing, Michigan, is a revolutionary, experimental and theoretical architect. He is regarded as the most original architectural visionary alive today. His work is primarily focused on theorizing architecture in places in crisis. He is the founder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture (RIEA) and is a Professor of Architecture at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. His most recent books are Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), The Storm and The Fall (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), and System Wien (Hatje Cantz/MAK, 2005). He is a recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design and his works are in public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the CooperÐHewitt National Design Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna; the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

Caveh Zahedi (born on April 29, 1960) is an American film director and actor of Iranian descent. His films include I Am a Sex Addict (2005), Tripping with Caveh (2004), The World is a Classroom (2002), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Was Possessed by God (1999), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), A Little Stiff (1991). He appeared and acted in In the Bathtub of the World (2001), Waking Life (2001), A Sign From God (2002), Money Buys Happiness (2000), I Was Possessed By God (1999), Treasure Island (1999), Citizen Ruth (1996), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), and A Little Stiff (1991).

Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland based filmmaker, writer and producer, is a major figure in European cinema. A professor at the Silesian University in Katowice and former president of FERA (Fédération Européenne des Réalisateurs de l'Audiovisuel), he is director of the Polish film studio TOR. Zanussi studied physics, film and philosophy in Warsaw and Krakow and graduated in film direction from the Lodz Film School. Since 1966 he has directed numerous documentaries and feature films and worked for television. Zanussi has also worked as stage and opera director in Poland, Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Switzerland. Major films: The Structure of Crystals, Family Life, Behind the Wall, The Illumination, The Contract, The Year of the Quiet Sun, Wherever You Are, Life for a Life, The Silent Touch, Camouflage, Weekend Stories, In Full Gallop, Our God's Brother, Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease

Siegfried Zielinski, Ph.D, became founding director, first rector, and Professor of Communication and Audiovisual Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His research focuses on history and theory, particularly the archaeology of the media. He teaches and researches at the Institute for time based media, Berlin University of Arts, MECAD in Barcelona, and holds the Michel Foucault professorship at the European Graduate School where he teaches techno-aesthetics and media archaeology. Siegfried Zielinski has published more than a dozen books and far over 150 essays, primarily in the areas of media history and theory.

Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at American universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research New York, University of Michigan). Ph.D.(Philosophy, Ljubljana; Psychoanalysis, University of Paris). A cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his use of Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture and is admired as a true "manic excessive". Author of The Invisible Reminder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject.