Bryan Norton received his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. He is a member of the German Research Foundation project Current Perspectives on Romanticism at Goethe University Frankfurt and is an alumnus of the Fulbright Foundation and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) programs. His work examines the role played by technical media in the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and the life sciences. He has published articles in Theory, Culture and Society, the Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts, The Goethe Yearbook, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
SHC Project
Fragments of the Concrete: Ecology and Technical Media in German Romanticism
Norton's first book project, Fragments of the Concrete: Political Ecology and Technical Media in German Romanticism, explores German romantic speculation regarding the possibility of a perpetuum mobile, uncovering an experimental attitude towards technical media in the making of natural knowledge. A synergistic mode of material reciprocity found in Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, and Hölderlin, he argues, stages a new political ecology of spatial relations rooted in a more ethical approach towards the natural world. His second project will turn to the Czech-German media artist Michael Bielicky, whose work highlights the need to interrogate the relationship between technological discourse and the life sciences when discussing the social and political impact of new media. He is also co-editing a volume of essays on the late philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler.