Todd Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles.  He is currently co-Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (with David Myers) and will become the Director of the Center in Spring 2011.  He is also the Chair of the proposed Digital Humanities undergraduate minor and graduate certificate program (slated to begin in Winter 2011). His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography.  He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body.  

Presner is the founder and director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces.  Awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008, HyperCities is an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities.  Our first HyperCities are Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, Rome, Ollantaytambo, and Tel Aviv, with many more in the works.  The project co-PIs are: Dean Abernathy, Mike Blockstein, Philip Ethington, Diane Favro, Chris Johnason, and Jan Reiff.

In the field of Digital Humanities, his current research focus on the development of the geo-spatial web, digital publications, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces.  Together with Willeke Wendrich, Diane Favro, and Jan Reiff, he is one of the co-director’s of UCLA’s undergraduate Keck Program in Digital Cultural Mapping. Together with Phil Ethington (USC, PI), the HyperCities project recently won a Haynes Foundation Grant for “Mapping LA Research Online” and, under the leadership of David Shepard (HyperCities, Technical Lead), a Google Digital Humanities Grant for “Geo-Scribe” (a map mark-up tool integrated with Google’s Book Search).

Books:

Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 279 + xxiv pp.

Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 368 pp.

Lead translator of a collection of essays by Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History/Spacing Concepts, Foreword by Hayden White (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),  363 pp.

Books-in-Progress:

A Message in a Bottle: Holocaust Writing on the Edge of Death.  Projected length: 250 pp. (in progress).  Taking its title from Paul Celan’s idea of a poem as a “Flaschenpost” (message in a bottle), this book analyzes a unique archive of Holocaust letters and diaries that were written days and sometimes even hours before the death of the author.  Using a conceptual framework built on the philosophies of Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, the project investigates the idea of writing blindly on the edge of death, the attempt to communicate to the future, and the ethical imperatives of being open to the message of the wholly other.

Digital Humanities 2.0, collaborative book project with Jeffrey Schnapp, Johanna Drucker, and Peter Lunenfeld (under consideration at University of California Press).  This collaboratively written, designed, and edited volume aims to articulate the theory and history of the second wave of “digital humanities.”  Providing disciplinary, institutional, and project histories, the book examines the state of the Humanities in the first decade of the twenty-first century and argues that the Humanities are more necessary than ever to understand the cultural and social implications of the massive technological transformations happening all around us.

Recent Articles:

“Hypercities: A Case Study for the Future of Scholarly Publishing,” The Shape of Things to Come, ed. Jerome McGann (Houston: Rice University Press, 2010), 251-71.  Also available online: http://cnx.org/content/m34318/latest/

“Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge,” Emerging Disciplines, ed. Melissa Bailar (Houston: Rice University Press, 2010), 63-86. Also available online: http://cnx.org/content/m34246/latest/

“Hegel’s Philosophy of History via Sebald’s Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the ‘New Space’ of Modernity,” in The Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 193-211.

“Digital Geographies: Berlin in the Ages of New Media,” in: Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, eds. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010) (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik),  447-69.

“HyperCities: Building a Web 2.0 Learning Platform,” in: Teaching Literature at A Distance, eds. Anastasia Natsina and Takis Tagialis (Continuum Books, 2010), 171-82.

“Remapping German/Jewish Studies: Benjamin, Cartography, Modernity,” in: German Quarterly, ed. Leslie Morris 82.3 (Summer 2009): 293-315

“The City in the Ages of New Media: From Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt to Hypermedia Berlin,” in After the Digital Divide: German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media, eds. Lutz Koepnick and Erin McGlothlin (Camden House, 2009), 229-51.

“Seeing Urban Spaces Anew at the University of California” (co-authored with Suzy Beemer and Richard Marciano), Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch, 3.2 (May 2007), 7 pages.  Available on-line at:

“Muscle Jews and Airplanes: Modernist Mythologies, the Great War, and the Politics of Regeneration,” in: Modernism/Modernity, 13.4 (Winter 2006): 701-28.

“‘The Fabrication of Corpses’: Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death,” Telos, no. 135 (Summer 2006): 84-108.

“Cultural History in the Age of New Media, or ‘Is There a Text in this Class?’” Vectors:Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Vol. 2 (Summer 2005).  The article is on-line (“launch project”)

“‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals’: Extreme History and the Modernism of W.G. Sebald’s Realism,” Criticism, special issue, “Extreme and Sentimental History.”  Vol. 46.  No. 3 (Summer 2004): 341-60.

“‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’: Max Nordau and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration,” Modernism/Modernity.  Vol. 10.  No. 2.  (April 2003): 269-96.

More Detailed information can be found here.