Thomas Y. Levin
Associate Professor of German
B.A., Yale University
M.A., Yale University
Ph.D., Yale University
Contact
Office: 210 East Pyne
Email: tylevin@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-1384
Profile
Thomas Levin joined the faculty at Princeton in 1990 following graduate study in art history and philosophy at Yale University and after a year as a fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. His teaching and scholarship range from the history of aesthetic theory and Frankfurt School cultural theory to the history and theory of media (archaeologies of vision, Early German Cinema, Weimar Cinema, New German Cinema, rhetoric of new media). His work on questions of aesthetics, technology, and sound (which he has continued to explore in regular team-taught seminars) grew out of his research on metronomes, gramophones, and the prehistory of acoustic inscription, as well as his activities as associate editor of The Musical Quarterly (where he was for many years responsible for the section on institutions, industries, and technologies of music). A former fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) and at the Institute for Advanced Study (Budapest), in 1999 Levin was chosen by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to be "artist-in-residence" at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where he developed a project entitled "Celluloid Rembrandtiana" that investigated the dynamics of cultural nationalism and mass media through a program of over a dozen films on Rembrandt (1920 to 1999) which was subsequently shown at the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt/Main, at the Arsenal Kino in Berlin, and in 2005 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. During the academic year 2000-01, which he spent in Germany as the academic director of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies at the FU-Berlin, Levin completed a study of the origins of synthetic sound in the late 1920s and an analysis of some theoretical issues posed by the advent of digital imaging. He also curated a major international exhibition entitled "CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother" which was on view at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe through late February 2002. Besides a number of further publication and curatorial projects related to his research on the aesthetic politics of surveillance --including "Anxious Omniscience" at the Princeton University Art Musuem and "9/11 + 1: The Perplexities of Security" at Brown University's Watson Center-- Levin is also working on two small books, one growing out of his Rembrandt Media project and the other on the film-theoretical cinema of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Levin spent the academic year 2004-2005 on sabbatical leave as a senior scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In November 2005 he organized a one-day conference at the Louvre Museum in Paris entitled "Photographie, Prison, Pouvoir : Politiques de l'Image Carcérale" which re-examined the history of what Levin calls the "carceral image" in the wake of Abou Ghraib. Most recently, Levin curated a small show entitled "'The Arts of the Future will be radical transformations of situations, or they will be nothing': Guy Debord Cineaste" at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Drawn from Levin's collection of the work of the Situationist International, the exhibition was inaugurated with a screening and roundtable discussion with Tony Vidler (Cooper Union, NYC), Keith Sanborn (Princeton) and Jean-Michel Rabbatte (U-Penn/Princeton) entitled "Film as Critical Practice: The Cinema of Guy Debord and the Spectre of the Situationist International".
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Department Profile: Comparative Literature
