Christina Gerhardt is an author, academic and journalist. She has written on a range of subjects, including the environment, film and critical theory. She has been the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor of Environment and the Humanities at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, [1] and held visiting positions at Harvard University, [2] the Free University of Berlin, [3] Columbia University and University of California at Berkeley, [4] where she taught previously and is now a permanent Senior Fellow. She has been awarded grants by the Fulbright Commission, [5] the DAAD, the National Endowment for the Humanities, [6] and the Newberry Library. [7] Her environmental journalism has been published (under Tina Gerhardt) in The Guardian , The Nation , Grist , Orion and Sierra Magazine , among other venues.
Gerhardt has made contributions to a number of fields, notably the environmental humanities, film studies and critical theory.
Professor Gerhardt is author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023), which the New Scientist called one of the "best popular science books of 2023" and the LA Times called "a work of art." Sea Change was a California Book Award Silver Medal winner for Contribution to Publishing and a Nautilus Award Silver Medal winner in the category Ecology and Environment. She is a regular commentator on radio and has been featured on the BBC's World Service, CBC's The Current and NPR's 1A, among other radio programs and podcasts.
She is also Editor-in-Chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. Gerhardt has written about walking and experiential learning, civic engagement and citizen science; about human-animal-environment entanglement; about petro-cultures and petro-landscapes, e.g. plastic and the Pacific; about sea level rise and islands; and about future shorelines. She also uses site specific public art installations to foster civic engagement. She has led walking tours, with both classes and the public, revealing the past histories of urban landscapes, considering how the present-day environment came to be shaped, and imagining possible futures.
Gerhardt has written about new wave cinemas of the long sixties, including feminist and political cinema, about the representation of the Red Army Faction in film, about New German Cinema and the Berlin School, and about directors ranging from Helke Sander and Harun Farocki to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hito Steyerl.
Gerhardt has published on critical theory and on Theodor W. Adorno. Her writings examine the concept of nature and of animals in the writings of the Frankfurt School's first generation. She has published articles on Adorno and nature; on nature in Adorno and Kracauer; on animals and compassion in the writings of Adorno, Horkheimer and Schopenhauer; and on animals in Adorno, Cixous, Derrida and Levinas.
The film industry in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema made major technical and artistic contributions to early film, broadcasting and television technology. Babelsberg became a household synonym for the early 20th century film industry in Europe, similar to Hollywood later. Early German and German-speaking filmmakers and actors heavily contributed to early Hollywood.
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist.
DEFA was the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic throughout the country's existence.
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmershe College, the London College of Printing, the University of East Anglia, and the British Film Institute.
Christina Sinatra is an American businesswoman, producer, talent agent, actress, singer and author. She is the daughter of Frank Sinatra.
Helke Sander is a German feminist film director, author, actress, activist, and educator. She is known primarily for her documentary work and contributions to the women's movement in the seventies and eighties.
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven is a 1975 German film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It stars Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Karlheinz Böhm and Margit Carstensen. The film was shot over 20 days between February and March 1975 in Frankfurt am Main. The film drew on both Sirk-style melodramas and Weimar era workers' films to tell a political coming of age story.
The Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin is a film school in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in 1966.
Meat Is Murder: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture is a book originally published in 1998, which examines cannibalism in myth, true crime, and film.
Thomas Elsaesser was a German film historian and professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director of The Sun Island, a documentary essay film about his grandfather, the architect Martin Elsaesser. He was married to scholar Silvia Vega-Llona.
Miriam Hansen was a film historian who made important contributions to the study of early cinema and mass culture.
Cristina Perincioli is a Swiss film director, writer, multimedia producer and webauthor. She moved to Berlin in 1968. Since 2003 she lives in Brandenburg.
Annette Frieda Kuhn, FBA is a British author, cultural historian, educator, researcher, editor and feminist. She is known for her work in screen studies, visual culture, film history and cultural memory. She is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Christina Stojanova is a Canadian media historian and faculty member at the University of Regina. Her work focuses on cultural semiotics in Canadian multicultural cinema, Central and Eastern European media and cinema, inter-war German cinema, and on the works of Jean-Luc Godard.
Joni Adamson is an American literary and cultural theorist. She is considered one of the main proponents of environmental justice and environmental literary criticism, or Ecocriticism. She is a professor of the environmental humanities and senior sustainability scholar at Arizona State University in Arizona. In 2012–13, she served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), the primary professional organization for environmental literary critics. From 1999 to 2010, she founded and led the Environment and Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association (ASA-ECC).
Catriona Sandilands is a Canadian writer and scholar in the environmental humanities. She is most well known for her conception of queer ecology. She is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She was a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture between 2004 and 2014. She was a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in 2016. Sandilands served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2015. She is also a past President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE).
Catherine O'Brien is a British academic, film scholar, linguist and writer. Her main fields are French cinema; the First World War in French and German cultures in relation to art and comparative literature and the intersections between cinema, theology and religion.
Catherine Elizabeth Rigby is a scholar in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities.
Wilbert Reuben ("Skip") Norman was a Black American filmmaker, visual anthropologist, and educator.