Faculty

Ben Kafka

-Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and History
-Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10)

Ben Kafka

Phone: (212) 992-8287
Email:

Please note: Professor Kafka is on leave until fall semester 2010 and may not be able to respond to all inquiries.

Ben Kafka is a historian of Europe with interests in writing, printing, paperwork, grammatology, and psychoanalysis. His articles and essays have appeared in Representations, Book History, Bookforum, and Cabinet. His first book, The Demon of Writing: The French Revolution in Paperwork, will be published by Zone Books (MIT Press). He has started a book on the history of graphology.

Within NYU, he is associated with the Department of History, affiliated with the Department of French, and a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He teaches courses on the history of the book, media archaeology, and problems of interpretation.

Beyond NYU, he has been a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows (2004-06) and the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10). He is a founding editor of the journal History of the Present and serves on the advisory board of the Feminist Theory Papers archive at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. He also occasionally writes about psychoanalysis at Tussis Nervosa .

He received his B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.


Publications

  • The Demon of Writing (under contract to Zone Books)
  • "Medium/Media" in Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton UP, forthcoming)
  • "Paperwork: The State of the Discipline," Book History #12 (2009) (link)
  • "Franz Kafka: The Office Writings," Bookforum (April/May 2009) (link)
  • "Power Hungry," Cabinet #32 (winter 2008/09) (view)
  • "Hunting the Plumed Mammal: The History of 'Bureaucracy' in France, 1750-1850," in Figures of Authority: Contributions Towards a Cultural History of Governance (Peter Lang, 2008)
  • "The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror," Representations #98 (spring 2007) (link)
  • "Sabotaging the Committee of Public Safety," Cabinet #22 (summer 2006)

Presentations

  • "Power Failures (paperwork, parapraxis)," for a conference "On Accident", Princeton School of Architecture
  • "Paperwork: Agencies and Subjectivities" (with Lisa Gitelman), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
  • "Humanities, Present and Future," Humanities Council, Princeton University
  • "Liberty, Equality, Paperwork," History of Material Texts workshop, University of Pennsylvania
  • "Mixed Media, Mixed Messages," Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University
  • "Freud's Waiting Room," faculty roundtable, NYU Comparative Literature graduate conference
  • "Vulgar Materialism: Wilhelm Reich's French Legacy," panel on "Recent Work in the History of Psychoanalysis," Society for French Historical Studies
  • "Wilhelm Reich and the History of Psychoanalysis," The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis
  • Seminar on "New Media Literacies: Gutenberg to Google," Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers
  • "The Disciplined State," conference on Archival Practice and Political Information in Early Modern Europe, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies, UCLA
  • "Extreme Materialism," contribution to the faculty roundtable on "La Vie de l'Oeuvre: Inception, Reproduction & Decomposition," the Department of French Graduate Conference, NYU
  • "The Imaginary State," paper for the conference on "Trope, Affect, and Democratic Subjectivity," Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern University
  • "Matter/Form/Power: The History and Theory of Paperwork," Council for the Humanities, Princeton University

Courses

  • History of Communication (udg)
  • Print Media and Modernity / Print: History and Form (grad, udg)
  • Media Archaeology / Dead Media Research Studio (grad, udg)
  • Psychoanalysis: Desire and Culture (udg)
  • Marxism and Culture (udg)
  • Special Topics in Critical Theory: Hermeneutics of Suspicion (grad)