Join as for a PhD & PostDoctoral Workshop with Fulbright-Karl Franzens University Graz Visiting Professor in Cultural Studies, Dr. Roy Grundmann from Boston University.
Organization: Dr. Marie Dücker
Please find more information here.
Before earning his graduate degrees in the United States, Roy Grundmann studied film and literature in Germany and England. His work has concerned itself with film and media in various modernist and postmodernist contexts and across a spectrum of modes of production ranging from mainstream narrative cinema and art cinema to avant-garde film and experimental non-fiction media. His teaching and writing have focused on the intersecting histories of these media and the cultural, philosophical, and political implications of their hybridization. Prof Grundmann follows developments that have expanded the traditional concept of media from being technologies of distribution to constituting larger infrastructures, environments, and ecologies. His current research is aligned with the Blue Humanities, which investigates the relationship between civilization and the sea. He is conducting a multi-tiered project on the ship—specifically, the classic ocean liner—as both a particular technological and cultural object and an “environing,” world-making medium that, by helping transform cultures around the world, has coded and recoded the oceans that connect those cultures.
Prof. Grundmann's book On Shoreless Sea: The MS St. Louis Refugee Ship in History, Film, and Popular Memory (SUNY Press, October 2025) takes the historic 1939 voyage of the Hamburg-Amerika-Line passenger ship St. Louis with over 900 Jews to the Americas and back to Europe as an occasion to explore the ocean liner as a biopolitical tool with multiple functions. It became a central instrument not only of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic politics of expulsion that turned the ocean into a dystopian structure of existence, but also of neo-colonialism, a context within which he situates the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Jewish migrant traffic to Latin America, and which remains an underdeveloped aspect of St. Louis memory culture and of Holocaust Studies in general. His second book, Floating Signifiers: Ocean Liners in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (SUNY Press, 2028) investigates how ocean liners have shaped modernity and postmodernity’s cultural imaginaries about migration, encampment, de/colonization, and tourism.