Faculty Fellow 2026/27
Maren Haffke is a media scientist and musicologist, and currently a Junior Professor of Sound Studies at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. She has conducted research, among other places, in the post-graduate programme “Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug” (The Documentary: Excess and Rejection) and the Mercator Research Group “Räume anthropologischen Wissens” (Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge) at Ruhr University Bochum. Her most recent book, Umgebungsaufnahmen. Zur Epistemologie, Technik und Ästhetik akustischer Ökologien (Ambient Recordings: On the Epistemology, Technology and Aesthetics of Acoustic Ecologies, 2025) examines the research field of acoustic ecologies from the perspective of media and culture studies. Her dissertation, Archäologie der Tastatur. Musikalische Medien nach Friedrich Kittler und Wolfgang Scherer (Archaeology of the Keyboard: Musical Mediums after Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Schere), drafts a media archaeology of musical keyboard instruments. Other research focusses include “sonic hauntologies” and mediums of care. She is a member of the editorial department of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft.
Abstract
Wendegeister
My project at LIAS explores relationships of East and West German sound practices around and after the reunification as part of a Sonic Hauntology: listening to and thinking through the spectral sound effects of Cold War conflicts. Following the publication of Jacques Derrida´s Spectres of Marx in 1993 ghosts and hauntological questions have been established motives in studies on postsocialist experiences in literature and film. From the perspective of Sound Studies this project proposes a German-German Hauntology of phantom pains, spectral resonances and echoes of absence.
Education
2016 PhD in Philology, Institute of Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum
2010 Magister in Musicology, Media Studies, and Psychology, University of Bonn
Most recent publications
“The Spaces of Sight and Sound – Containment, Feedback, and Contingency in R. Murray Schafer’s Acoustic Ecology”. Sound Studies 11, no. 2 (2025): 210–233.
Umgebungsaufnahmen: Zur Epistemologie, Technik und Ästhetik akustischer Ökologien. Vienna and Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2025.
with Jasmin Degeling. “Sorgepraktiken der Online-Rechten: Jordan Petersons Therapeutik des Self-Authorings”. In digital:gender – de:mapping affect. Edited by Julia Bee, Irina Gradinari, and Katrin Koeppert. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2025.