Bernhard Siegert is Professor for Theory and History of Cultural Techniques at the Media Faculty at the Bauhaus University Weimar. He gained his Dr. phil. in 1991 from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (German Literature, History, Linguistics), and his Habilitation from Humboldt-University in 2001 (venia legendi for Kulturwissenschaft and Media Studies). Since 2008 he is one of the two directors of the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy at Weimar. Since 2013 he is the spokesman of the DFG Research Group “Media and Mimesis” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
He has been Senior Fellow at the IFK in Vienna, Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (2008 and 2011), LeBoff Visiting Scholar at the Department for Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (2015), and in 2016 he won the International Visiting Scholar Award of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
His current research focuses on the cultural history and theory of the ship and the ocean, hybrid and quasi-objects, the genesis of representation, and operative ontologies.
His recent books are: Passage des Digitalen. Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften 1500 – 1900 (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 2003); Passagiere und Papiere. Schreibakte auf der Schwelle zwischen Spanien und Amerika (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). He is also the co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung and of the year-book Archiv für Mediengeschichte.
