Prof. Dr. Viktoria Tkaczyk

Wax: Material Resources of Phonographic Research

After receiving her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin, she was a Feodor Lynen Fellow at the History of Science Research Center REHSEIS (CNRS) in Paris and a member of the Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Between 2011 and 2014, she was Assistant Professor for Arts 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 “Episteme of Modern Acoustics” at the MPIWG and a subproject on the history of early modern acoustics in the CRC “Episteme in Motion” (FU Berlin) and initiated the database “Sound & Science: Digital Histories”. In 2023, she was a visiting professor at Princeton University; currently, she is a fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Viktoria Tkaczyk specializes in technologies and techniques of knowledge in the early modern and modern periods. Her first book, Himmels-Falten: Zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit (Fink 2011), on flight as an object of fascination in early modern art and science, was awarded the Ernst Reuter Dissertation Prize in 2008 and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis Book Prize in 2012. Tkaczyk has since explored the long history of acoustics, which spans basic and applied research, the natural sciences and the humanities. Her book, Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 was published in 2023 (University of Chicago Press). Currently, she is working on a new project exploring how humanistic and scientific technologies are interlinked with geopolitics and resource regimes, and is a Speaker of the research center “Applied Humanities” at the HU Berlin.

Selected texts

 Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

 Himmels-Falten. Zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011.

“Supplied Knowledge: Reconsidering the Resources of Epistemic Tools,“ Special Issue, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 114/2, 2023 (edited with Christine von Oertzen).

“Sounds of Language, Languages of Sound,“ Special Issue, History of Humanities 6, 2021 (edited with Julia Kursell and Hansjakob Ziemer).

Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 (edited with Mara Mills and Alexandra Hui).

For a full list of publiations see: https://medienwissenschaft-berlin.de/leute/prof-dr-viktoria-tkaczyk/