Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Lou Silhol-Macher is International Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of German Studies and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her current project, “Of Goo and Dust: Aesthetic Theories of Formlessness,” theorizes the emergence of an aesthetics of formlessness in German and American film and visual arts from the 1970s to the present day. Engaging current cross-disciplinary conversations about formalism and materialism as renewed methods of inquiry, “Of Goo and Dust” centers minoritarian artworks that reveal form and the formless as political categories. She is also at work on her second book project, “Artificial Images,” which interrogates the current reconfiguration of discourses on images — their ontologies, anthropologies, politics — and the paradigmatic shift heralded by AI. She holds a Ph.D. in German and Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a recipient of the Townsend Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship and was a Norman Jacobson Memorial Teaching Fellow. Her research and writing can be found in Camera Obscura, liquid blackness, and Qui Parle.