Lecturers

Jane Arnison is an Australian composer, producer/engineer and sound artist. Her experience in working with music and sound traverses the popular and reaches out into the experimental. Her knowledge is grounded a combination of conservatoire studies in new music composition and practical experience engineering in commercial recording studios. A duality of technical savvy in combination with a deep understanding of the inner workings of sound has been Jane’s calling card throughout her career. Throughout her career she has had a wide range of experiences; work alongside big names like Cyndi Lauper and INXS; as well as fostering and nurturing local talent in Berlin; and continuing her personal artistic output, including involvement with the Michele Lamy ‘Infinite’ Installation at Julia Stoschek Collection. Jane has collaborated on releases on Ostgut Ton, Mord, !K7 Records, Human Level, Domino, Netwerk, Poker Flat, Universal, Sony, EMI and many other indies. Always interested in new opportunities and expressions, Jane follows her instincts, which has led her to a highly varied creative output. Whether it is producing and engineering a record, creating sound art installations, sound design, or mixing in stereo or immersive formats; the main thread that ties it all together is a fascination with sound as an expressive medium that drives all of Jane’s endeavours.

M.A. in Teaching German as a Foreign Language, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
B.A. in German Literature and Culture, NYU

Kandice Chapman teaches classes for the German Language Program at NYU Berlin. Her academic interests include contrastive linguistics and the acquisition of German grammatical gender. In her free time, she enjoys listening to jazz and watching surrealist films. Kandice lives in the neighborhood Friedrichshain.

kandice.chapman@nyu.edu

An academic and a filmmaker, Zeynep Dadak holds a PhD from the Cinema Studies Department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her debut feature film Mavi Dalga (The Blue Wave, 2013) had its international premiere at 64th Berlin Film Festival, receiving many awards in and outside Turkey. Her films including her second feature film Ah Gözel İstanbul (Invisible to the Eye, 2020) were screened at prestigious film festivals such as Rotterdam, Sheffield, Dokufest, San Francisco and Jeonju. Zeynep Dadak was selected for the Medienboard Artist in Residence in Berlin in 2018 and Berlin Senate’s Weltoffennes Program in 2019. She directed a mini-series called Terapist (The Therapist) for an online platform in 2021 and keeps teaching film classes and workshops worldwide. Currently based in Berlin and Istanbul, she is working on a science-fiction film, Electric Sleep. Her dissertation, ‘A Maudlin Cinema: Arabesk Film and Culture in Turkey,’ reflects on her research interests: genre in film, transnational cinemas, urban culture, film and other arts. At NYU Berlin, Dadak teaches film.

Pierre Depaz is an educator, artist and programmer from France. He has taught at NYU and CUNY and is currently researching at the Film-Universität Babelsberg. He is interested in the multiple ways computers are attempting to represent and interface with human concepts and emotions. His academic research revolves around simulation, semantics and public organization through technological means, while his artistic practice includes digital games, computer simulations, interactive installations, networked performances and experimental web projects, and has been exhibited in NYC, Paris, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Brussels and Berlin.

pierre.depaz@nyu.edu

Manuel teaches classes for the German Language Program at NYU Berlin. He studied Philosophy, Religion, and Politics at Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg, and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard. His academic interests include critical theory and thinking (instinct → opinion → knowledge → judgment → intuition), environmental ethics, and the intersections of ethics and aesthetics. He is currently writing his dissertation at Harvard on “Aesthetic Education in the Face of Ecological Crisis.” Offering classes on the topic e.g. via the Socrates Project (Open Society University Network), he aims to play a part in providing a forum to opening up academic discourses to a broader audience.

Ph.D. Comparative Literature/Religious Studies

Laura Gemsemer graduated from Freie Universität Berlin in 2018. A doctoral fellow of the excellence cluster 264 Topoi and a student at Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies, her thesis about Giovanni Boccaccio’s poetics of love formed part of the research group “Space and Metaphor in Cognition, Language, and Texts.“ During her PhD she actively participated in many conferences and published various articles. Previous to her doctorate, she obtained two Master’s degrees (Comparative Literature and Religious Studies) at Freie Universität. For her Bachelor’s degree she studied Comparative Literature and History of Art. Her research focusses on the interdependency of language and reality and, more specifically, on metaphorical speech as a powerful tool to shape reality.

Besides, she also loves to deal with popcultural texts and films. Subsequent to her doctorate, Laura founded Sprachraum Berlin-Schöneberg where she teaches German as a foreign language and literature classes. From 2019-2022 she worked as an editor for a 125 issues part-time magazine (Hachette/Milanoedit). In addition to her teaching at Sprachraum she has had teaching assignments at Bard College Berlin (fall 2021) and is currently teaching at Duke University (since summer 2022) and with NYU Berlin (since fall 2022).

Friederike Hirz is a theatre director, who graduated with honors from ERNST BUSCH ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ARTS in Berlin. She assisted directors such as Frank Castorf and René Pollesch at VOLKSBÜHNE AM ROSA LUXEMBURG PLATZ BERLIN where she made her debut as a director in 2013. Her works move at the interface between political theory, choreography and theatre. By creating collective dramatic situations in the performative space, she aims to provoke the experience and change of social dynamics. Within her studies at the Academy of Dramartic Arts, Friederike was a guest student in the BA Dance and Choreography at the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen (Denmark) and at the Inter–University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT) where she completed two semesters of the MA Choreography program. She learned Applied Stanislavsky, Action Analysis and Five Point Analysis amongst others from Thomas Ostermeier. Since 2020 she has been a guest lecturer for the Stanislavski Method of Physical Action at NYU Berlin. Her methodological research circles around the question of how to apply Active Analysis to choreographic and experimental theater forms beyond the classical spoken theater. Besides her own productions, she frequently works as a dramaturg and writer for film and dance productions.

fh2236@nyu.edu

Guido Hesselmann has been teaching classes in Cognitive Neuroscience at NYU Berlin since 2018. After his Ph.D., he worked at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. From 2011–2018 he was the deputy group leader of the Visual Perception Lab at the Charité university hospital in Berlin. His current main research interests are the scientific study of consciousness, visual information processing in the human cortex, and computational modeling of perceptual decisions.

guido.hesselmann@nyu.edu

Heiko Hoffmann is a German journalist, curator, lecturer and consultant. He has been editor-in-chief of Groove magazine, an industry-leading electronic music magazine, for the past 18 years. He has written for international publications such as Pitchfork, Spin and Sound & Recording (Japan) and has hosted his own show Nightflight on German public radio station Fritz. Heiko has been a key-note speaker and panelist at conventions and festivals such as Sonar, MIDEM and ADE. He is a member of the board of advisers at Goethe institute and jury member of a number of international artist programs and teaches the History of Popular Music in Germany class at NYU Berlin.

heiko.hoffmann@nyu.edu

B.A. Art History, NYU 2000
M. Arch., Columbia University and Parsons The New School for Design, 2008
M.A. Art and Architectural History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2016
Ph. D. candidate, Architectural History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2016

Tarek Ibrahim received his BA in Art History from New York University in 2000 and his M Arch at Columbia University in the City of New York and Parsons The New School for Design in 2008. He moved to Berlin shortly thereafter, where he worked for several years as a practicing architect, most notably at the firm of Sauerbruch Hutton, before returning to academia in 2012. He received his Master’s in Art and Architectural history from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2016. Mr. Ibrahim is currently a research associate for the director general of the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace, which opened at the end of 2020. In addition, he is writing his PhD on the life and work of the German architect Johann Adam Rennebaum as a mirror of - and a window onto - the German expatriate community in Egypt around 1900. His thesis on the architecture of Shepheard’s Hotel of Cairo was published by the German Archaeological Institute in 2019.

ti201@nyu.edu

Christine Korte holds a Ph.D. in Communications and Culture from York University in Toronto.

Her dissertation focused on the Berliner Volksbühne theater under artistic director Frank Castorf in the period after German reunification. Her research interests include the workers' theater movement in Weimar era Berlin, the West Berlin post-punk scene, as well as the diversification initiatives underway in current Berlin theater. Christine is a passionate instructor devoted to bringing creativity into the undergraduate classroom. She has taught at the University of Toronto, York University, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. In addition to her scholarship, Christine is a dancer, performer, and synth-pop enthusiast.  
ck3633@nyu.edu

Marcela López is a geographer with an interdisciplinary background in urban and environmental studies. She is the founder of Contested Urban Waterscapes, a platform that provides space for dialog and practical action between scholars, social movements and public service providers to search for alternatives to reduce water inequalities. Her main fields of research include corporatization, water governance, urban infrastructures, citizenship; socio-ecological inequalities; urban political ecology; and environmental history.

ml8178@nyu.edu

Tobias Neubelt teaches classes for the German Language Program at NYU Berlin. He studied History, German Language, and German Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, as well as German in the Context of Multilingualism at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and German as a Foreign and a Technical Language at Technische Universität Berlin. He has worked as part of an intercultural translation project as well as an instructor at the University of Delhi followed by employments at Freie Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin. His academic interests include contrastive linguistics and intercultural communication.

Sven Ohl studied Psychology at Potsdam University and the University of California, Berkeley. During his Ph.D., he did his research on eye movements at Potsdam University, the Charité Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Since 2016, Sven pursues his research as temporary principal investigator at Humboldt University in Berlin. His main research topic is centered on the interplay between actions, perception, and visual memory. Sven has been teaching classes in Perception at NYU Berlin since Fall 2020.

sven.ohl@nyu.edu

Pau Palop-García is a Research Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) where he is associated with the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS). In the past years, he has also been a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt. Pau Palop-García holds a PhD in Political Sciences from the Freie Universität Berlin (2019). He specializes in the study of migration policies and the political representation of migrant communities. He has published widely about these topics in journals such as Democratization, Citizenship Studies, Comparative Migration Studies, Citizenship Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Colin Self is a composer and choreographer based in New York and Berlin. He creates music, performance and environments for expanding consciousness, and for troubling binaries and boundaries of perception and communication. Self works with communities across disciplines and practices, using voices, bodies, and computers as tools to interface with biological and technological software. Self has presented work at The Dutch National Opera, HAU Berlin, The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen NYC, Issue Project Room, among many international festivals and venues. He is a Rhizome Commission Grant recipient for his video project ClumpTV, and a Queer Art Mentorship Fellow. He served as an Eyebeam Resident in 2016 and a resident fellow at Etopia for FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain in 2018. He is a co-founder of the New York City queer performance collective Chez Deep and The Radical Diva Grant. He completed his MFA in Music & Sound at the Bard Milton-Avery Program in 2017. His second album, Siblings, was released in November 2018 and regarded as one of NPR's 50 albums of 2018 and Pitchfork's 50 experimental albums of 2018.

Ph.D. in Art History, University Tübingen; Habilitation, Technical University Dresden

Dr. habil. Paul Sigel studied Art History and German Literature at the University of Tübingen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1997 with a dissertation on the Architecture and Exhibition Displays of German Pavilions on World Fairs as Media of National Self-Representation, published in 2000 as a book (Exponiert. Deutsche Pavillons auf Weltausstellungen). In 2006, he edited the anthology Konstruktionen urbaner Identität together with Bruno Klein, and in 2009 he published studies on Baukultur. Spiegel gesellschaftlichen Wandels together with Werner Durth. In 2010, he received his Habilitation (professorial qualification) at the Philosophy Department of the Technical University Dresden. Paul Sigel has taught and worked on research projects at TU Dresden und TU Darmstadt, and he has worked as Guest Professor of Art History at the TU Dresden, of Urban History at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at TU Berlin, and of History and Culture of the Metropolis at the HafenCity University Hamburg.

His current research areas are History and Theory of Architecture from the 19th century to today, architecture and national representation, studies in the discourses on “Baukultur,” and studies of debates on urban identity. Berlin’s urban and architectural history is one of the main fields of his research and publications.

paul.sigel@nyu.edu

Dr. phil. in Political Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Felix Steilen specializes in the history of modern social and political thought. He was a visiting graduate student at the New School for Social Research, in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and at Tel Aviv University. After earning a doctorate from Humboldt-Universität in 2019, he did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Goethe University Frankfurt and at Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, he is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (in Leipzig). At NYU Berlin, he enjoys teaching "The German Intellectual Tradition."

felixsteilen@nyu.edu

Matthias Strobel is the President of MusicTech Germany, the Federal Association for Music Technology in Germany, and founder of Wicked Artists, a booking agency for creative technology and new media artists. He is Germany’s main point of contact for music technology innovation and his network of entrepreneurs, industry executives, researchers, and his connections to (inter)national policy makers make him one of Europe’s renowned experts in that area.
Strobel works as a consultant, mentor, and independent manager to help accelerate avant-garde approaches from startups. Determined to further the innovative potential – and thus future success – of artists and entrepreneurs, he uses his experience and leverages his network to help create the music ecosystem of tomorrow. Strobel has given lectures at Berklee College of Music Valencia, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, Filmuniversität Babelsberg and Hamburg Music Business Summer School.
He curates conferences and facilitates events on innovation for the music ecosystem to foster knowledge transfer between visionaries from all intersections of the creative industries. His event series, the Berlin Music Tech Meetups, has grown into a community of more than 1,700 music tech enthusiasts. Strobel holds a B.A. in Business Communications from the University of Applied Sciences, HTW Berlin.

ms13864@nyu.edu

PhD History, Vanderbilt University

Carolyn Taratko is a historian of modern Germany and its transnational entanglements. She is particularly interested in histories of food, science, and natural resource management. Her first book project explores how Germans came to see the food supply as an object of governance between 1871 and 1945. She is currently a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Erfurt and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

carolyn.taratko@nyu.edu

DPhil in History, University of Oxford, 2013.

M.A. in History, University of Chicago, 2008, NYU

M.A. Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005

B.A. in International Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002

Andrew Tompkins is a Berlin-based historian of contemporary Europe who has published extensively on transnational history, protest movements, and border regions.

He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2013 before holding a post-doc at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and subsequently serving as Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Sheffield. His first monograph, Better Active than Radioactive! (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined transnational connections between French and West German anti-nuclear energy activists. From 2020 to 2022, he conducted a DAAD-funded research project at the Universität Erfurt and Uniwersytet Wrocławski on Polish women who worked in East German factories during the 1980s. His current research examines everyday life along the Polish-German and French-German borders after 1945.

Andrew is a citizen of Germany and the United States who has also lived for extended periods in the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Japan. He teaches “Berlin’s Modern History” at NYU Berlin.

andrew.tompkins@nyu.edu

Florian Ullrich teaches Elementary I and Elementary II at NYU Berlin. After receiving his bachelor's degree in English Literature from Freie Universität Berlin, he studied  Teaching German as a Foreign Language for his Master at Technische Universität Berlin. During his Master's, he spent a semester abroad in Beijing. In his master thesis he looked at the history of teaching German to the first and second generation of guest workers in Germany. Like many others, he currently has an enthusiasm for ChatGPT and is interested in seeing if and how AI can be used in language teaching.

Sebastian Willert is an art historian who received his Ph.D. from the Technical University Berlin in February 2022. He earned a Master’s in History at Leibniz University Hannover in 2016. After attending a seminar about Provenance Research in 2015, he focused his research on questions concerning the provenance, dispossession, and translocation of archaeological objects from the Ottoman Empire to the global north. Between 2017 and 2020, he participated in the Ph.D. program “Ancient Object(s) and Visual Studies” (AOViS) at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies (BerGSAS). Simultaneously, he was Predoctoral Fellow in the research cluster “Translocations. Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets” at the Chair for Modern Art History at Technical University Berlin. His research was funded by the Excellence Cluster topoi, Technical University Berlin, Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grants of Max Weber Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Orient-Institute Istanbul. In the summer of 2021, Sebastian was affiliated with Boğaziçi University’s Department of History in Istanbul. His research focuses on the valorization, instrumentalization, and translocation of cultural assets within the 19th and 20th centuries, with a regional emphasis on the Ottoman Empire. At NYU Berlin, Sebastian teaches Ancient Art.