About Me

As of 1 September 2023, I am Associate Professor of Digital Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Trnava. Since September 2020, I've been also embedded with the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic) where I am Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies.
From 2009 until 31 August 2023, I worked at the Catholic University of Ruzomberok (Slovakia) where I was Head of Department of English and American Studies between 2018 and 20212. Between 2012-2013, and 2018-2020 I also held a part-time position at the University of Pannonia, Veszprem, Hungary, where I taught Critical and Cultural theory. 

In the past I have studied and held fellowships at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the University of Oslo, and Newcastle University. In 2014 I was an Early Stage Research Fellow in the Humanities at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna. 

 

I was awarded my Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies in 2009, and subsequently moved into media studies (with emphases on television and digital media). In my Ph.D. thesis "Framing the Body - Staging the Gaze: Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film" I looked at popular representations of forensic science and autopsy. I relied, among others, on Derrida's concept of "trace" to explore how the body functions as a repository of signs, how it is translated into discourses written in the language of science, and how these discourses find their way into popular television - bringing about an aesthetic and epistemic shift in the ways we think about quality television and crime dramas in particular. 

 

My research interests now move between and across the fields of cultural studies and media theory. Most recently I have been focusing on the concepts of (digital) subjectivity in the Anthropocene, with special emphasis on the logic of supplementation and agency in human-machine- and human-animal interactions. My other (semi-professional) interest is digital photography and Instagramism.

 

I am a member of: Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Crime Studies Network, CriMeNet: Criminal Minds in German Studies Network, European Communication Research and Education Association, and the Modern Language Association. Since 2013, I have been co-editor of the ECREA blog section of Critical Studies in Television Online, and I am on the editorial board of Americana E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary.

 

 

Projects

I'm currently in the process of starting a new initiative (with my colleague Egen Zelenak) entitled European Perspectives on Climate, Conflict and Migration (EUPECCOM, 2023-2026), funded by ERASMUS Jean Monnet LS. The main objective of the project is to introduces three tailor-made courses (a module) to the students of the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, who will have a chance to learn more about the topics of climate, conflict and migration, and, what is even more important, to enter a critical discussion about them. One of these courses focuses on the issue of war on terror (more generally on violence) and how this subject is approached in media. Whilst the other two courses examines the three key topics of climate change, conflict and migration and it offers an in-depth examination of how these topics are represented in media. In this way, students have a great opportunity to focus on some of the most eagerly debated issues in Europe today and how they are represented.

 

In 2023, in cooperation with Janka Kascakova (Ruzomberok), we completed a research project focusing on Central-European fantasy and the legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien across media (VEGA: J.R.R. TOLKIEN A ŽÁNER FANTASY V STREDNEJ EURÓPE, R.Č. 1/0005/18.) A major output of the project is the an edited collection entitled J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions, and the Legacy (Routledge, 2023). This collection analyses how discourses about fantasy are produced and mediated, and how processes of re-mediation shape our understanding of the historical coordinates and local peculiarities of fantasy in general, and Tolkien in particular, all that in Central Europe in an age of global fandom. The collection examines the entanglement of fantasy and Central European political and cultural shifts across the past 50 years and traces the ways in which its haunting legacy permeates and subverts different modes and aesthetics across different domains from communist times through today’s media-saturated culture.

 

Between 2010 and 2013 I was holding a 'Field-Specific Post-Doctoral Fellowship' at the University of Ruzomberok and Newcastle University. During the tenure of the Fellowship I was conducting research in the exciting and emerging field of medical humanities. The purpose of my project "Techne and Episteme: the Meta-Narratives of Medicine in Popular Culture (Seeing Machine, Forensics, Medical Dramas)" was to re-contextualize medical epistemology, more specifically the concepts of body, illness and disease with respect to the growing participatory and technological awareness that characterizes the history of medicine. 

 

I had the opportunity to further-expand this research in 2014 as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Istituto di Studi Avanzati, Universita di Bologna. In consultation with Prof. Maurizio Ascari, and further colleagues at Bellaria Hospital's Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, I explored how the technics of therapeutic practice and bio-medicine generate their own meta-narratives in science, art, and media. I examined the ways these interconnected narratives circulate - through converging media and technologies – subversive epistemologies.

 

I channeled the summary of the project for publication into a number of articles, and into a section of my book Human | Non | Human: Technics and Subjectivity across Media (Americana Ebooks, 2023). This monograph mobilizes a wide range of examples that inscribes themselves into the respective histories of technics, subjectivity, and mediation. Moving from the mediatization of 19th century autopsy, through contemporary forensic crime television and medical dramas, to manifestations of affect and agency in television’s participatory culture, to examples of prosthetic media, to posthuman television, the book argues that articulations of the human via technology entail a dismantling of demarcations via disembodied and re-embodied forms of subjectivity, and offers takes on a dialectic underpinning the (re-)embodiment of that which the human is not (but hopes to be), gesturing at a sense of becoming, always-already en-route to its own transcendence.

   

My other longer-running research project has to do with human and non-human subjectivities. My purpose is to examine the ways posthumanism and the 'Anthropocene' are being re-thought within a media- and cultural studies framework. In my work I draw, among other things, on Sloterdijk's idea of bestialization, Zizek's thoughts on objective and subjective violence, and Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity and its applications to Law, testimony, hospitality, and technicity (as substitution and supplementation). I look at how autoimmunity is involved in a variety of cultural discourses of the political – ranging from the politics of space (habitation, migration, virtual landscapes and the map) to the politics of violence (war, terrorism, organized crime, capital punishment, surveillance and counter-intelligence), and human-non-human relations (with special emphasis on non-human sentience). To that end in 2017 I set up our Anthropocene Media Lab, a fully crowd-funded research platform that explores the ways in which media are used to produce and circulate understandings of human life in the Anthropocene, and to examine how media themselves contribute (as agents) to various conceptualisations as well as critiques of the Anthropocene.

 

CV