Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkely and has been named to the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University.

Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, was published in 2023 by Stanford University Press. Her scholarly work has been published in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett.

Before coming to UC Berkeley, Bradley was an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University, and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Professor Rizvana Bradley offers the following courses on American Art in the Summer Term 2024: 

• Horror and the Cinematic Unconscious (BA course)

Wednesdays noon – 2 p.m., Kennedy Institute (Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin) room 319; course number 32101-S24, first session on April 16, 2024. 

The philosopher and media theorist Eugene Thacker has argued that “horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable.” But how might such a conception of horror be complicated, enriched, or problematized if we were to approach the genre by way of the racial underside of the unthinkable? This course will explore cinematic and artistic exemplars of horror in order to think through the philosophical intersections of race and gender with notions of the haunted, the macabre, the Gothic, the monstrous.

Please register at: culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de with your name, matriculation number, study program, home university (if applicable), zedat email address or email address of home university, and type of exchange program (if applicable). Deadline for registration is April 8, 2024. Please register on Campus Management as well and as soon as possible.

• Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty II (MA course)

Wednesdays 4 – 6 p.m., Kennedy Institute (Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin) room 319; course number 32114- S24, first session on April 16, 2024. 

Last winter term, Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty (I) began from the following questions: How might we begin to approach the affective contours of what Lauren Berlant theorized as the “impassivity” of the historical present, in ways that do not immediately circumscribe the terms of inquiry by demanding they lead to resolution, reparation, or redress? What forms of attunement, accompaniment, and experimentation might be occasioned by inhabiting what the Feel Tank Chicago termed “political depression” as an open question, rather than through predetermined diagnostics? Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty II differentially extends these questions by attending to cinematic exemplars of the catastrophic imagination associated with the socio-ecological crises of late capitalism and the so-called Anthropocene. This course takes up such lines of inquiry through explorations of affect theory, its interlocutors, and its critics, with a particular emphasis on what Sianne Ngai terms “minor feelings” and “negative affects,” in their racial and gendered dimensionality. We will pay special attention to films that obliquely take up this constellation of affective themes, investigating how they aesthetically refract, rather than simply reflect, the myriad impasses (economic, ecological, scientific, political, racial, gendered, etc.) of the present and the project of recuperating sovereignty in the midst of global crisis. Completion of Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty (I) is not a prerequisite for enrollment.

Please register at: culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de with your name, matriculation number, study program, home university (if applicable), zedat email address or email address of home university, and type of exchange program (if applicable). Deadline for registration is April 8, 2024. Please register on Campus Management as well and as soon as possible.

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Winter Term 2023/24: 

• Art, Race, And Media Poetics (BA course)

Wednesdays noon – 2 p.m., Kennedy Institute (Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin) room 319; course number 32101-W23, first session on November 1, 2023.

This course focuses on the relationships between black aesthetics and the ongoing redefinition and reinvention of art and media cultures. Poetics will be taken up, not as a specific literary form per se, but as a modality of formal innovation that obtains across a variety of genres and mediums. The course will take three modes of black cultural production as its foremost objects of inquiry: film, art, and poetry. Our aim will be to draw from texts and visual material in order to critique the nature of what the contemporary poet, Claudia Rankine, terms the “racial imaginary.”

Please register at: culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de with your name, matriculation number, study program, home university (if applicable), zedat email address or email address of home university, and type of exchange program (if applicable). Deadline for registration is October 16, 2023. Please register on Campus Management as well and as soon as possible.

• Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty (MA course)

Wednesdays 4 – 6 p.m., Kennedy Institute (Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin) room 319; course number 32115- W23, first session on November 1, 2023. 

How might we begin to approach the affective contours of what Lauren Berlant theorized as the “impassivity” of the historical present, in ways that do not immediately circumscribe the terms of inquiry by demanding they lead to resolution, reparation, or redress? What forms of attunement, accompaniment, and experimentation might be occasioned by inhabiting what the Feel Tank Chicago termed “political depression” as an open question, rather than through predetermined diagnostics? This course takes up such lines of inquiry through explorations of affect theory, its interlocutors, and its critics, with a particular emphasis on what Sianne Ngai terms “minor feelings” and “negative affects,” in their racial and gendered dimensionality. We will pay special attention to films that obliquely take up this constellation of affective themes, investigating how they aesthetically refract, rather than simply reflect, the myriad impasses (economic, ecological, scientific, political, racial, gendered, etc.) of the present and the project of recuperating sovereignty in the midst of global crisis.

Please register at: culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de with your name, matriculation number, study program, home university (if applicable), zedat email address or email address of home university, and type of exchange program (if applicable). Deadline for registration is October 16, 2023. Please register on Campus Management as well and as soon as possible.