Dr Jacob Bard-Rosenberg is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Art Theory at the Edinburgh College of Art. Prior to joining ECA he graduated with a BA in Music (Cambridge), an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies, and a PhD in English and Humanities (Birkbeck College). His PhD focused on the role of dream texts in the history of German critical theory, while discussing major works of literature (Goethe, Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Brecht) and music (Mahler, Schubert, Beethoven), as well as developments in metaphysical, psychoanalytic, and historiographic approaches to memory and forgetting in the mid-20th century. He subsequently taught on the MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, as well as working as a research assistant to Prof. Katrina Forrester of Harvard University on a project interrogating Marxist-feminist accounts of the state, and as a Research Associate on the British Academy Funded project ‘A New Democratic (Dis-)Order: Race, Identity, and Political Mobilisation in France and the UK, c.1970-Present’ at Edinburgh’s Department of History.
Between 2016 and 2021 he worked as The Archivist at MayDay Rooms in London. This archive is dedicated to conserving and interrogating histories of social movements, radical arts, and cultures of resistance of marginalized groups from the 1960s to the present. He collected and managed over 50,000 objects, including prison writing, techno zines, Women’s Liberation Movement magazines, housing campaign materials, histories of experimental art education, and media emanating from global decolonial struggles. In this role he also co-edited two books: one on radical film and photography collectives after 1968; and another on countercultural printed ephemera of the 1970s and 1980s.
About my research
My research is focused on the cultural and intellectual history of German critical theory, drawing on the legacies of German classical philosophy, problems in aesthetics across modernity, debates in psychoanalysis and metapsychology, critical approaches to philology, and 20th century transformations in Marxist thought. My work is thoroughly interdisciplinary and ranges from debates in the philosophy of colour, to critical musicology, to issues in comparative literature and classical social theory. Alongside this, I have significant expertise in the social and media histories of political radicalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I have also published on recent political art and poetry. I am currently working on several research projects including a monograph on shame, blushing, and inflationary logics in the work of Walter Benjamin; several articles on Theodor W Adorno; an essay on images of insects in Karl Marx’s Capital; translations of notes to Adorno’s seminar series in Frankfurt from before the Nazi seizure of power; and an essay on the intellectual history of the 1970s journal The Black Liberator.