Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

Ben Kafka

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication & History

Ben Kafka

Phone: (212) 992-8287
Email:

Ben Kafka is a historian of Europe who studies the powers and failures of paperwork. He teaches courses on print culture, media archaeology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. A former member of the Princeton Society of Fellows, he is the recipient of a Fulbright as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Society for French Historical Studies, and others. He received his B.A. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown and his Ph.D. in History from Stanford.

Prof. Kafka is also associated with the Department of History, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He is co-organizer of the "Technics of Liberalism" working group at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge.

In addition to his work on paperwork, he has started a second book on the history of graphology.


Publications

  • The Demon of Writing: Paperwork and the Making of Modern France (book in progress)
  • "Hunting the Plumed Mammal: The History of 'Bureaucracy' in France, 1750-1850," in Peter Becker and Rudiger von Krosigk, eds. 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)
  • "Paperwork," Cabinet #22 (summer 2006)

Presentations

  • "The Bureaucratic Medium, or for an Ethics of Paperwork," contribution to the Symposium on Media, Ethics, and the Global, American University in Paris
  • "Extreme Materialism," contribution to the faculty roundtable on "La Vie de l'Oeuvre: Inception, Reproduction & Decomposition," the Department of French Graduate Conference, NYU
  • "Ordering In: Dinners at the Committee of Public Safety," symposium on interdisciplinary food studies, Princeton University
  • "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
  • "The Disciplined State," panel on early modern information culture, Society for French Historical Studies, Rutgers

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)
  • Media and Ethics Workshop (American University in Paris - summer 2008)