Periodization

Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy 2026

Date: June 22-26, 2026

Location: Stanford Berlin, Haus Cramer, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin

Application Deadline: March 13, 2026

Open to advanced PhD candidates 

How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. Although they “have no witnesses” (Blumenberg), they constitute a persistent schematism that has proven extremely productive since the so‑called »saddle time« (Koselleck). Periodizations structure time and allow for “significant” markers, enable narrative schemes, stabilize institutions and epistemologies, and in this way also shape concepts of the future and of expected caesuras. They operate as lasting calls to recognize patterns which, when new ones are discovered, may dissolve or remain resilient and continue to have an effect. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations. 

The Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2026: Periodization will address the following core areas: theories and models of periodization (e.g. epochal thresholds, longue durée, kairos, tipping points); epistemological foundations and implications of the division of time; critique of traditional concepts of epochs; media and disciplinary histories of periodization in different fields (history, literature, philosophy, art, theology, etc.); global perspectives on periodization (asynchronicity, but also cyclical, genealogical, or cosmological temporal orders); and the media and materialities of periodization (calendars, chronicles, exhibitions, textbooks, AI, forensics). 

Core Faculty

  1. Adrian Daub (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
  2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies, Stanford)
  3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)
  4. Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Leuphana)
  5. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
  6. Lea Pao (German Studies, Stanford)
  7. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
  8. Aileen Robinson (Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford)

Special Guests

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)

Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)

further guests to be announced… 

Application

All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.

Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,

Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf. Please email your applications by March 13, 2026 to stanleu@leuphana.de.

The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged. 

General information

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.