Dr Jacob Bard-Rosenberg
Biography
I hold a BA in Music from the University of Cambridge (2007), an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London (2011), and a PhD in Critical Theory also from Birkbeck College, University of London (2022). Before joining ECA in 2024, I taught on the interdisciplinary BA Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck and the MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
My doctoral research focused on the role of dream texts, aesthetics, and theories of memory within the German critical theory tradition, concentrating on the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Alongside an engagement with mid-twentieth-century metaphysical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and historiographic approaches to memory and forgetting, this work involved discussions of major works of literature (Goethe, Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Celan), and music (Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler).
I have served as a research assistant to Prof. Katrina Forrester of Harvard University, working on a project interrogating Marxist-feminist accounts of the state, and as a Research Associate on the British-Academy-funded project ‘A New Democratic (Dis-)Order: Race, Identity, and Political Mobilisation in France and the UK, c.1970–Present’ at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of History.
Between 2016 and 2021, I was The Archivist at MayDay Rooms in London. This archive is dedicated to conserving and interrogating histories of social movements, radical arts, and cultures of resistance from the 1960s to the present. In this role, I collected and managed over 50,000 objects—including prison writing, techno zines, Women’s Liberation Movement magazines, housing-campaign materials, histories of experimental art education, and media from global decolonial struggles. I also co-edited two books: one on radical film and photography collectives after 1968, and another on countercultural printed ephemera of the 1970s and 1980s.
Research interests
- Critical theory and contemporary continental thought
- Philosophical aesthetics
- Political art and poetry, and media histories of social movements
- Psychoanalysis and metapsychology
- Intellectual and cultural histories of the 19th and 20th centuries
I teach art theory across the modules for the BA Fine Art programme. I am the Course Organiser for the fourth-year Visual Culture Research Project modules and teach on the Visual Cultures strand of the MA Contemporary Art Practice.
Research
Research
My research is focused on two separate areas: First, the cultural and intellectual history of German critical theory. While centrally addressing Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and their legacies, my work draws on the legacies of German classical philosophy, problems in aesthetics across modernity, debates in psychoanalysis and metapsychology, critical approaches to philology, and 20th century transformations in Marxist thought. My work is thoroughly interdisciplinary and ranges from debates in the philosophy of colour, to critical musicology, to issues in comparative literature and classical social theory.
Second, I have significant expertise in the social and media histories of political radicalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I have particular areas of expertise in the long histories of situationism and workerism, as well as their unfurling in the media and the arts (including film, video, and documentary photography) as well as the media and theoretical landscape of second wave feminism.
Beyond these, I have a particular interest in artistic, poetic, and philosophical responses to the Holocaust; German intellectual life in exile and return during the mid-20th century; and emerging problems of political art and poetry.
I am currently working on several research projects including a monograph on shame, blushing, and inflationary logics in the work of Walter Benjamin; several articles on Theodor W Adorno; translations of notes to Adorno’s seminar series in Frankfurt from before the Nazi seizure of power; an essay on the intellectual history of the 1970s British black power journal The Black Liberator; as well as a little collaborative piece with the poet Anne Boyer.
PhD Supervision Topics
- Walter Benjamin
- The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
- Modern and contemporary issues in aesthetics
- Problems of art and politics, especially in relation to political radicalism, Marxism, social movements, and the borderlands of art and media
- Psychoanalytic approaches to art
- Interdisciplinary projects incorporating music, literature, and their theoretical domains
- The long history of the avant-garde
- Experimental approaches to the archive
- Art-theory projects inflected by eighteenth- to twenty-first-century continental philosophy
- Theoretical approaches to poverty, devaluation, trash, and rubble across modernity
