Jörn Ahrens is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, and Extraordinary Professor of Social Anthropology at North-West University, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Free University Berlin and a Habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin. His main research fields are: Violence, culture, and society; popular media and culture; nature and culture; cultural theory. Recent publications are Praise of Biopolitics? The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Will for Self-Preservation, in: The European Sociologist, Issue 45: Pandemic (Im)Possibilities Vol 1, 06/2020, <https://www.europeansociologist.org/issue-45-pandemic-impossibilities-vol-1/theorising-praise-biopolitics-covid-19-pandemic-and-will>; Der Mensch im Klima. Klimawandel und Anthropologie, in: Christoph Wulf / Jörg Zirfas (eds.): Den Menschen neu denken, Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, Vol. 29 (1/2020); and Zur Erfindung des Comics in Deutschland. Frühe Perspektiven der Comicforschung, in: Closure – Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung, Vol. 7 (11/2020), <https://www.closure.uni-kiel.de/closure7/ahrens>. His current research focuses on the cultural perception of climate change in Southern Africa and on the discourse about comic books in Germany from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Axel Fliethmann, Monash University
Axel Fliethmann is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of literary theory, media philology and theory of the image. He studied Literature, History and Philosophy at the University of Cologne (Germany) where he also received his PhD (Dr. phil.). Before joining the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash in 2002, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the research center for “Medien und Kulturelle Kommunikation” (Centre for media and cultural communication) at the University of Cologne. In 2018 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is the author of Stellenlektüre. Stifter. Foucault (Niemeyer 2001), and of Texte über Bilder. Zur Gegenwart der Renaissance, (Rombach 2014). He is also one of the co-founders and co-editors of the peer-reviewed journal Limbus. Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies. He has published widely on literary theory, visual cultures, and media philology. In his current research he investigates connections between material images and concepts of imagination in Early Modern Times, in particular intersections between image technologies, the formation of the modern concept imagination in aesthetic theory, and pathologies of imagination in medical discourse.
