September 24, 2024
Professor Nicholas Baer has published two books in 2024. His monograph, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024), reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.
Together with Annie van den Oever, Baer also edited the open-access volume, Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Featuring 28 leading international media scholars, Technics rethinks technology for the contemporary digital era, with cutting-edge theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions. The volume’s contributors explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and Sylvia Wynter in conjunction with urgent questions concerning algorithmic media, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. An expansive collection of writings on media technologies in the digital age, Technics is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media studies, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of technology.