Associate Professor, Germanic Languages, Jewish Studies, UCLA Home page

Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

He is the founder and director of two digital mapping projects that utilize GIS to explore the layered cultural histories of city spaces: Hypermedia Berlin (an interactive, web-based research tool and collaborative authoring environment for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of Berlin) and HyperCities, a dynamic platform for linking physical space with geo-temporal information. His current research focus on the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces.

At UCLA, he directs an initiative called “Media, Technology, and Culture,” which is charged with creating new intellectual tools, pedagogical and curricular practices, research methodologies, and disciplinary paradigms for the humanities in the 21st century. He is also the Chair of the Center for Digital Humanities Faculty Advisory Committee.

 Links:      Home page | Hypermedia Berlin | HyperCities