Robin Curtis (scholar)

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Robin Curtis is a Canadian film and media scholar and cultural critic who is based in Germany. She currently holds the chair in Media and Cultural Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where she also chairs the department of Media and Cultural Studies (Medienkulturwissenschaft - which combines German Media studies with perspectives on humans, animals and things as well as culture, audiences, everyday life and aesthetic experience familiar from Cultural Studies and Film Studies).

Her writings have appeared in both German and English. In recent years she has contributed in particular to the development of the theory of immersion as well the link between empathy, empathy aesthetics (or Einfühlung) and the capacity of audio-visual media to destabilize the subject via atmospheric qualities or mimetic processes. Further contributions focus on the manner in which the audio-visual medium requires a distinct approach to autobiography and other forms of "reports" on or documents of the self and its situation within time and space.^[1]

She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Pop: Kultur und Kritik^[2] and Jahrbuch immersiver Medien.^{[3][failed verification]}

Her work as an independent curator includes her collaboration in 2001 with Laura U. Marks commissioned by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen entitled "Out of Time: Bodies of Temporality." In this section consisting of 19 90-minute-programmes, which included contributions by guest curators Jeremy Rigsby, Johan Grimonprez, Victor Masayesva Jr., Rick Prelinger and Herbert Schwarze, Patricia R. Zimmermann, Jan-Christopher Horak, Grahame Weinbren, and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Curtis and Marks took up the topic of temporal perception in the present. Curtis has also curated programmes for Arsenal: Institut für Film- und Videokunst e.V. in Berlin, for the Goethe Institut in Palestine and Israel. and was a member of the curatorial team for the 2002 Werkleitz Biennale on the topic of the capitalist logic of intercultural and sexual profit in the programmes entitled "Zugewinngemeinschaft."^[4] The Biennale's Website offers the following description of the topic: "Curated by a team of 12 artists and executives this years biennial is set to focus on the roots of apartheid as a broad-based and subtle phenomenon and to look at how separate identities are coined culturally, socially and politically, be it on the basis of colour, sex and class, or on the basis of education, wealth and profession. How do such factors define and reinforce the notion of ‘they’ on the one hand, and ‘we’ on the other? A confrontation with the architecture of divisiveness and its possible antidotes, even if these be utopian in nature, will be at the heart of the 5th Werkleitz Biennial. Its title “Zugewinngemeinschaft” – a term from German marital law – can, however, also be understood in a much more far-reaching sense: if it is applied to a society that in many regards defines itself through added value (or is focused on it) and tends to want to exclude any other obligations, other political circumstances come into view."^[5]

Her short film Nachlaß completed in 1992 and is distributed by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto and by Arsenal: Institut für Film- und Videokunst e.V. in Berlin.^[6][7][8]