William Stewart
William Stewart is a scholar of cultural history, media studies, and theories of art and architecture in 20th- and 21st-century Europe. His research focuses particularly on the impact that mathematical discourses around quantification, axiomatics, and abstraction have had on cultural production and definitions of the human being, especially in the postwar Germanies.
Stewart has published and presented research on the polymath and philosopher of technology Max Bense, the artist Hanne Darboven, the architect Frei Otto, and the design pedagogies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. His writing has appeared in journals such as October, Grey Room, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (ZMK), and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Stewart’s teaching foregrounds questions of media and modernity, with emphases on visual cultures, philosophies of technology, and aesthetic forms under late capitalism. He offers courses on a wide range of subjects, including the relation of psychoanalysis to literary studies as found in the work of Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Ingeborg Bachmann; the theories of subjecthood under capitalist modernity developed by Walter Benjamin; and the ways that German art and media theory have long grappled with topics of “artificial” “intelligence.”
Stewart received a PhD jointly from the Department of German and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. During the 2018–2019 academic year, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) in Weimar, Germany.