Adam Wickberg is a Postdoctoral fellow in media and environmental history at KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin (MPWIG I) 2020–2022. His research interests include media theory, digital cultures, AI, environmental humanities, posthumanities and new materialism, as well as the history of climate change knowledge and the Anthropocene.
He has published widely on issues of media history and theory, including digital issues, and the relation between media infrastructures, environment and knowledge, in contemporary expressions like the Anthropocene as well as the deeper historical roots of the eco-crisis. His book Pellucid Paper: Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain was published by Open Humanities Press 2018 in the series Technographies.
He is a member of the Environmental Humanities Lab, The Posthumanities Hub and an external member of the Portuguese ERC project RUTTERS: Making the World Global. He has worked as an editor of journals of literature and contemporary art and is currently co-editing a special issue on Environing Media which brings together leading scholars of media theory and environmental history to work out a new theory for how media creates environments. He is also engaged in developing research on the history of media and climate change epistemologies as well as the impact of AI and automation on environmental data.
He is currently working on a three year project funded by the Swedish Research Council called PLUS ULTRA which investigates the environmental media epistemologies and infrastructures of the Spanish Colonization of Americas 1570-1620. This project aims at explaining how the first Globalizaton of the Early Modern Age depended on a systematization of media formats that environed the Americas in Western epistemology.
Monographs and edited books
– Pellucid Paper: Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain (London: Open Humanities Press 2018), peer reviewed and full open access.
– Cultural Techniques of Presence: Luis de Góngora and Early Modern Media (diss. Stockholm university 2016), 286 p.
– Universitetet som medium, ed. Adam Wickberg Månsson & Matts Lindström, (Mediehistoriskt arkiv 2015), open access: http://mediehistorisktarkiv.se/bocker/universitetet-som-medium/
Refereed articles and book chapters
– ”Anthropocene Historiography”, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (2020) Vol. 8, no. 1, special issue “Roots of the Future” (forthcoming).
– “Singular Causality and Contingent Singularity: Towards a Theory of Post-digital Handwriting”, Media Theory (2020) vol. 4, no 1.
– “Intimacy and Singularity of Post-digital Handwriting”, Trace: Journal of Writing, Media & Ecology (2020), vol. 4 no. 1.
http://tracejournal.net/trace-issues/issue4/05-wickberg.html
– “Plus Ultra: Francisco Hernández and the Mapping of American Natureculture” in Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (2018:2).
– ”Poetics of the Planetary: Alexander von Humboldt and the Temporality of the Americas ”, in Scientific Temporalities: Mediating and Materializing Time ed. Anders Ekström & Staffan Bergwik, (Berghahn Books, 2020).
– “Time, Thinking, Technology: An interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht” in Swedish (”Tid, tänkande, teknologi: En intervju med Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht”), Adam Wickberg Månsson & Mira Stolpe Törneman, Universitetet som medium (Mediehistoriskt arkiv 2015).
– “Universitetsmediet och humanioras historia: en inledning”, Adam Wickberg Månsson & Matts Lindström, Universitetet som medium (Mediehistoriskt arkiv 2015).
Conference contributions
– “Environing Media and the Shaping of Landscapes”, invited keynote lecture at Shaping Landscapes conference, Lisbon University, Nov. 2019. More: Environing Media and the Production of Landscape
– “Anthropocene Historiography” at New Humanities and the Anthropocene, KTH May 2019.
– “Singular Causality and Contingent Singularity: Towards a Theory of Post-digital Handwriting”, Materiality and New Materialism, symposium, Stockholm University 2019-05-28.
-” The Aesthetic Experience of Nature in Colonial Americas: Natural History and the Mediation of New Lifeforms”, Symposium on Early Modern Aesthetic Experience at Vitterhetsakademien, Stockholm, Oct. 25th 2018.
– Mediocene, chair and convener of symposium at KTH Environmental Humanities Lab with invited speakers including Bernhard Siegert (IKKM, Weimar).
– ”Times of Nature, Times of Culture: Notions of Temporality in Alexander von Humboldt´s Journey to Equinoctial Regions”, conference ”Mediating and Materializing Time: Scientific Temporalities 1750-1950”, Stockholm university, June 2017.
– ”The Anthropocene, Media and the Emergence of Global Political Expansionism”, paper in symposium About Time! on historiography and temporality chaired by prof. Aleida Assmann, Dept. of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm university, April 26-27th, 2017.
– Organizer of conference ”Media as infrastructures of Being: Meaning, Environment and History”, Stockholms university, 2017-06-04, chair of panel ”Philosophies and Histories of Media”, including John Durham Peters.
– “New perspectives on Hispanic poetry”, presentation of Cultural Techniques of Presence at Paris Sorbonne IV, November 12th, 2016.
– Presentation of Cultural Techniques of Presence at annual meeting of Swedish society for literary studies, Uppsala University, Nov. 2016.
– “The book and the Portrait: Cultural Techniques of Subjectivity and Sovereignty”, paper on the conference The Book to Come: Norlit 2015.
Research review, translations and popular science
– ”Den Materielle Drejning: Natur, teknologi, kropp i nyere dansk poesi”, commisioned review of Danish book on new materialism, poetry, nature and technology for national annual review of literature Samlaren 2018.
– ”Krisen i Katalonien visar hur historien är påtaglig”, Dagens Nyheter, 2017-10-17.
– Discussion of digitization and handwriting in Aftonbladet TV, 2016-06-01
– Discussion of digitization and handwriting in SR pp3, Swedish national radio, 2016-05-12.
– “Polyfemos och Galatea” and “Översättarens kommentar”, in Aiolos 1, 2015, translation to Swedish of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora’s mythological poem Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea.