Olivia Poppe (MA) is a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Berkeley, starting in Fall 2025. Previously, she was a university assistant at the chair of Cultural History of Audiovisual Media in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies, and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the Doctoral School of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna.
In Berkeley, Olivia will explore concepts of 'haunting' and 'spectrality' as theoretical approaches to understanding social and material precarity in its affective expressions. Furthermore, she will investigate the media specific implications in philosophies that invoke the figure of the ghost. To do so, Olivia will analyze socio-cultural and aesthetic ‘ghosts’, either summoned by, or haunting contemporary German and European film and media works.
Research Interests: Hauntology, Spectral Turn, Film- and Media Theory, German Essay Film, Intersectionality, Class and Precarity, Gender and Queer-Feminist Theory, Race and Decolonial Thought, Critical Theory, Deconstruction, Discourse/Dispositive, (Post-)Cinema, Sound Studies, Archive and Science History, Fin de Siècle Media, New/Digital Media, Media Micropolitics.
