This is an inaugural symposium, of the Program in Comparative Media at Columbia University. Comparative media refers to an interdisciplinary approach to studying the history and future of media technologies and their place in our aesthetic, technological and social worlds. It decenters our normative understanding of media in three major ways.  First, it returns to the past, to examine previous media revolutions, to see what brought them about, what their effects were, and how key features are present or absent in today's digital media.  Second, it emphasizes how global and cosmopolitan the futures and histories of media have been and will be. Instead of seeing media in China or India as repeating a trajectory first lived in the West, it retheorizes media by paying attention to the specific contexts within which they emerge and are appropriated.  Thirdly, rather than privileging one medium it seeks to examine the intermedial relations between different technologically mediated cultural forms.

This symposium brings together scholars from literature, anthropology, film, architecture, art history music, media theory and other disciplines.

• 10:00am12:30pm
  Animism and Media

  • Chair

    Stefan Andriopoulos

    Columbia University

  • Speaker

    Tom Gunning

    The University of Chicago

  • Speaker

    Tadeu Capistrano

    Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (EBA / UFRJ)

  • Respondent

    Rosalind Morris

    Columbia University

• 1:30pm5:00pm
  Intermediality and the Nature of the Medium

  • Chair

    Reinhold Martin

    Columbia University

  • Speaker

    Peter Geimer

    Freie Universität, Berlin

  • Speaker

    Kajri Jain

    University of Toronto, Mississauga

  • Speaker

    Mara Mills

    New York University, Steinhardt

  • Respondent

    Ying Qian

    Columbia University

• 5:30pm7:30pm
  Keynote

  • Introduction

    Brian Larkin

    Barnard College, Columbia University

  • Keynote

    Ravi Sundaram

    Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

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