Prof. Dr.
Viktoria Tkaczyk

Portrait photograph of Professor Viktoria Tkaczyk, bright yellow background

Photo: Kopf & Kragen

I am Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In addition to my role as Speaker of the research center “Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics,” I lead the DFG project “Raw Materials of the Humanities” at HU Berlin and teach at the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources.” I have published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media, earning several fellowships and prizes. Most recently, I was a visiting professor at Princeton University and a fellow at the HIAS in Hamburg. At the research center “Applied Humanities,” I will embark on a global historical inquiry into the roles of humanities scholars in shaping and reshaping media infrastructures throughout the modern era.

  • Media Conceptions: From the Laboratories of the Humanities

    Today’s media infrastructures are built and governed by powerful technology firms, yet their foundations rest as much on humanistic thinking as on technical expertise. My historical project shows that pivotal media technologies have rarely been engineered in isolation, but emerged through sustained collaboration with humanities scholars. Case studies spanning the 20th and 21st centuries—from early telephony laboratories to current AI research—highlight the humanities’ formative role in shaping, critiquing, and reimagining media. On a global scale, the project examines how scholars mobilized their visions of media to advance both epistemic and political agendas, continually recalibrating the tensions between intellectual discourse, technological transformation, and power.

  • ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6856-1224

    2025. “Sounds in Wax: Comparative Musicology, Chemistry, and the World as a Resource.” In Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes, edited by Fanny Gribenski, David Pantalony, and Viktoria Tkaczyk, 181–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    2023. Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    2023. Edited with Christine von Oertzen. “Supplied Knowledge: Reconsidering the Resources of Epistemic Tools.” Focus, Isis 114, no. 2.

    2021. “Radio Voices and the Formation of Applied Research in the Humanities.” History of Humanities 6, no. 1: 85–110.

    2020. Edited with Mara Mills and Alexandra Hui. Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • 2025. Applied Humanities: Genealogy & Politics: Inaugural Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies “Applied Humanities” (conference organized with the Center’s team), May 15–17.

    2025. “Wiring Nature: The BBC’s Interwar Resource Regime” (keynote lecture). Annual conference of the Working Group on Auditory Culture & Sound Studies, Society for Media Studies, University of Bonn, March 27.

    2024. “The ‘Laboratory Humanities’: Genealogies of a Controversial Research Practice” (presentation). Séminaire Histoire des sciences humaines et sociales, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, May 3.

    2023. “Shaping Tongues, Ears, and Brains: Disciplines of Language Planning around 1900” (presentation). Department of German, Georgetown University, November 10.

    2023. “Waxen Knowledge: A Material Resource History” (Klopsteg Lecture). Science in Human Culture Program, Northwestern University, October 9.

  • viktoria.tkaczyk[at]hu-berlin.de
    phone: +49 (0) 30 2093 65861 / +49 (0) 30 2093 66190