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Dr Dariusz Gafijczuk

Formerly at Lancaster University

Dariusz Gafijczuk

Research Interests

My areas of research and interest comprise cultural history, social and historical theory, art and aesthetics andphilosophy. I'm currently holding a Newton International Fellowship investigating the role of music at the turn of the 20th century in social and cultural identity construction.

The core of my research focuses on how spaces of transition and transformation arise and become the vehicles for cultural and political identity building projects. To date, I have investigated various artistic and intellectual representations of this phenomenon (including visual arts, psychoanalysis, design and architecture). I am now extending what I have learned to contemporary societies through the concept of 'antipolitics' as the grounding pattern for the modern political economy of communication. My methodological approach treats art, especially the acoustics of sound, as the paradigm of disembodied/distance communication. This approach considers artistic production as not only expressive of larger social forces, but a communicative technology - forms of historical media through which the logic of transformations and identities shows itself in a unique light.

The project for which I have been awarded the Newton International Fellowship, entitled "The Ruins of Mitteleuropa: an Investigation into the Cultural Blueprints of the Centre," uses sound—in this case the music of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and the Czech composer Leoš Janácek—as a means of exploring a moment of history and the type of perception that goes hand in hand with it. The context of this investigation is the necessity to rethink the meaning and memory of "Central Europe" as a geographical marker. I am co-operating in this endeavour with Prof. Derek Sayer.

Publications

Books:

The Echo Complex: Freud, Schoenberg and the Sound of Modernity (Cornell University Press - final review).

Articles/Book Chapters:

"Resonant Topographies: Central Europe's Paradoxical Middle", Theory, Culture & Society (accepted for publication/forthcoming).

"Max Weber's Science of Composition", Journal for Cultural Research, 15(1), January 2011: 95-112.

"Adolf Loos: Architectures in Abeyance" in Contested Passions: Sexuality, Eroticism and Gender in Austrian Literature and Culture (ed. Clemens Ruthner, Peter Lang, New York - forthcoming, 2011)

"Bending Modernity: Chairs, Psychoanalysis and the Rest of Culture", Journal of Historical Sociology, 22(4), December 2009: 447-475.

"From Durkheim's Society to Postmodern Sociality", History of the Human Sciences, 18 (3), August, 2005; 17-33.

Space, Time and the Other, in Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia, Youth Violence--International Sociological and Psychological Perspectives (Weinheim: Juventa, 2002): 31-47

In Progress:

'Collapsing into Time: The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe' (edited collection, under review).

'Landscapes of Disquiet' (under review, Common Knowledge).

'History of the Implicit' (in preperation).

Additional Information

The Newton International Fellowship is supported by the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the British Academy.

website: http://www.newtonfellowships.org/the-fellowships.html

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