Carmen Schmöl is a researcher, writer, curator and lecturer, currently working as a research assistant in the project Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe at Bauhaus Universität Weimar.
She holds Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and German Literature (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) as well as Economics (Freie Universität Berlin). Since beginning her Master's degree in German Literature at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she has worked as a student-, curatorial and grading assistant (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / NYU Shanghai), sits on various appointment, doctoral and selection committees and, over a span of 2.5 years, conducted four research seminars involving a variety of joint research projects, workshops, artist residencies, writing colloquia and applications for CfPs.
In two of these research seminars she explored questions of postmodernism, capitalist realism, accelerationism, and their intertwining with contemporary cinematographic imageries as hyperstitional and mundane entities. Another, conducted together with Ringo Lukas, examined Reza Negarestani’s early work Cyclonopedia – Complicity with Anonymous Materials, interrogating modes of theoretical fiction and experimental narrativization in relation to “the West”. Her most recent research seminar, revolving around the question “Who are you writing to?”, she was locating the figure of the addressee in contemporary American literature and new experimental cinema featuring queer-feminist and migrant experiences, dissecting autotheoretical and -fictional implications and potentialities, while spanning out the question of new emerging forms of writing, having a touch on New York Downtown writing scene and digital phenomena like Angelicism01.
Her current research revolves around contemporary autotheoretical, essayistic, and experimental writing, which she accesses and rearranges using film theory concepts such as “hors-champ” and “suture”, asking for textual and filmic linings as an absent psyche and constructing a methodology for an off-space of the text, while working with considerations of dissociative states, narrative a priori, the addressee and discursive mining. Alongside this research, she extensively engages in analyzing the fragmentary writing of Angelicism01 and works on her own literary project.
- Autotheory
- Contemporary Philosophy
- Experimental Writing
- Comparative Literature and Film Studies
04/2021–03/2022 – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Cultural Theory and History Supervisor: Dr. Andreas Gehrlach
“Cinematographic Readings of Late Capitalism – Trajectories of the Mundane and the Everyday” (SS 2021)
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10/2019–03/2021 – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, bologna.lab, Department of German Literature
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Burkhardt Wolf
“Theory Fiction and Narrative Manipulation: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia – Complicity with Anonymous Materials” (WS 2020/21 with Ringo Lukas)
“Cyberpunk – Identities and Space in the Sphere of Postmodernism and Capitalist Realism” (WS 2019/20)