Joachim Schätz is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of German at UC Berkeley (Fall 2026 and Spring 2027), supported by an FWF Erwin Schroedinger Fellowship.
He is a film and media scholar with a focus on useful cinema and the poetics/politics of comedy. His current project, Educational Film Comedy. Laughing and/about Learning, brings these two areas of interest together. It is dedicated to exploring how humor been utilized and conceptualized in educational film practices (as a resource, disturbance, embellishment…), contributing to a cultural history of feelings since the early 20th century.
Joachim Schätz has served as university assistant at University of Vienna from 2019 to 2024 and is an associated senior researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History in Vienna. He has conducted third-party-funded research on educational film practices in Austria, the travel media of Colin Ross (1885-1945), industrial film and contingency and film and photography in Red Vienna. He has been a member of the international research network BTWH (Berkeley/Tübingen/Vienna/Harvard) since 2009.
For a list of publications and lectures, see: https://tfm.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personal/joachim-schaetz/
