Viktoria Tkaczyk is full professor in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and co-speaker of the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities.” She has published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media. Currently, she is working on a new project exploring how humanistic and scientific technologies are interlinked with geopolitics and resource regimes, and on a collaborative project entitled “Applied Humanities: Genealogies and Politics.”
After receiving her Ph.D. in Theater Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, Tkaczyk was a Feodor Lynen Fellow at the History of Science Lab REHSEIS (CNRS) in Paris and a member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 2011 to 2014, she was Assistant Professor of Art and New Media at the University of Amsterdam and Dilthey Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG). From 2015 to 2020 she led the research group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” at the MPIWG and the project “Epistemic Dissonances: Objects and Tools of Early Modern Acoustics” at the Freie Universität Berlin (German Research Foundation), and initiated the database “Sound & Science: Digital Histories.
Her first book, Himmels-Falten: Zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2011), on flying machines in early modern science and theater, won the Ernst Reuter Dissertation Prize in 2008 and the Book Award of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in 2012. Her recent publications include Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2023); “Sounds of Language, Languages of Sound,” special issue, History of Humanities 6 (2021), ed. with J. Kursell, H. Ziemer; Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (OUP 2020), ed. with A. Hui, M. Mills; “Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux,” special issue, Sound Studies 6 (2020), ed. with L. van der Miesen; “Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences,” special issue, Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019), ed. with C. Birdsall; and the collaborative database Sound and Science: Digital Histories.
