Global Humanities Junior Fellow at Freie Universitaet Berlin

September 2014 - February 2015

Daniel Schwartz’s research explores how changing political structures and utopian ideals manifest themselves in the exploration of both the narrative and technological possibilities of film. He focuses primarily on the question of how the advent of sound affects avant-garde film theory and practice in early German and Russian cinema. He situates this question not only within the context of developments in montage theory from Lev Kuleshov to Walter Benjamin, but also in the context of developments in psychology and neuroscience, particularly with regard to the behaviorist theories of Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. These theories, he argues, give rise to a new era of neurological metaphors that manifest themselves in early experimental approaches to sound film such as Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass.

Daniel Schwartz is a graduate student in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a bachelors degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago and masters degrees in philosophy and German literature from Johns Hopkins. He has taught courses on film production and theory. Recently he concluded a fellowship with the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins. He is currently working towards a PhD in comparative literature.