dfore@princeton.edu
Devin Fore’s research and teaching focus on the material culture, political logics, and media infrastructures of German and Russian modernism. He is author of Realism after Modernism (2012), Soviet Factography (2024), and Mass Technics of the Document (forthcoming). He is an editor of the journals October and New German Critique and, together with Kerstin Stakemeier, edits a monthly column in e-flux titled “Fantasies of the People.” He will serve as an Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council for 2026-27.
Fore’s project as Old Dominion Professor, History, A Procession of Peasants, examines the explosion of interest in the cultures and economies of nomadic peoples during the 1920s. Taking up the ancient genre of the pastoral, avant-garde writers, artists, and filmmakers of the period explored logics of nomadism and practices of transhumance as solutions to the conflicts of modernization across multiple domains, whether geographical (center versus periphery), affective (proximal versus distal), economic (industrial versus agricultural), or anthropotechnical (artificial versus natural). The book’s four chapters on Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Mikhail Okhitovich, and Erwin Piscator are punctuated by three conceptual insets on the biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll, the geographical psychology of Kurt Lewin, and the natural history of state-forms proposed by Karl August Wittfogel. History, A Procession of Peasants argues that revisiting the pastoral impulse of the previous century is of paramount importance today, when political polarization plays out spatially in the conflict between progressive cities and the conservative countryside, and when we face the pressing ecological imperative to rethink the antagonism of urban-industrial centers to their surrounding environments.
Read his full biography on the Department of German website.
