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. Silhol-Macher 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.