Prof. Dr. Eva Horn

Eva Horn is professor of Modern German literature and cultural history at the University of Vienna. She has taught in Germany, Switzerland, the US, France, and Austria. Her research revolves around the interactions of fiction, scientific knowledge and political thought. After her PhD on German Romanticism, she published a book about political secrecy in the 20th century, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction. In recent years her research has focused on the ways in which the future, and more specifically, catastrophic futures are addressed in literature and film. Her book The Future as Catastrophe: Disaster Imagination in the Modern Age assesses the history of disaster scenarios in fiction, politics and science, from nuclear apocalypse to the visions of climate change since the 18th century. Currently she is finishing an introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene for the humanities, together with Prof. Hannes Bergthaller (Taichung) (forthcoming in German and English in fall 2019). From 2014-2018, she directed Climate’s Time, a research project on literary conceptions of climate from the 18th century to the present and its inherent temporalizations of nature. She was a visiting professor at the German Departments of NYU and Columbia University, and has been a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschafliches Kolleg at Universität Konstanz (2008) and the Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam (2016). She is currently the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network.

RCC Research Project: Air: A Cultural Theory of Climate

Lunchtime Colloquium Video - "Air. A Cultural Theory of Climate"

Selected Publications:

• with Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. London/New York: Routledge 2019 (forthcoming).

• The Future as Catastrophe. Translated by Valentine Pakis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

• "Air as Medium." Grey Room 73, (Fall 2018): 6-25.

• "Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat." In REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Vol. 22, edited by Winfried Fluck, Herbert Grabes, Jürgen Schlaeger, Brook Thomas, 65-84. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2017.

• "Air conditioning. Taming the Climate as a Dream of Civilization" In Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary. Edited by James Graham, 233-243. Zürich/New York: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016.

• "Klimatologie um 1800. Zur Genealogie des Anthropozäns." Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1, (2016): 87-102.