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Clemens Finkelstein

Scientific Researcher at the Panel on Planetary Thinking

Clemens Finkelstein is a historian of the built environment and theorist in the planetary humanities. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, a PIIRS Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and a Scientific Researcher ("Planet as Method” project) as well as Affiliated Fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking. His dissertation “Architectures of Vibration: Environmental Control, Seismic Colonialism, and the Frequency of Life, 1898-1928” investigates the evolutionary epistemic shift and materialized cosmologies of vibration in the transimperial entanglements of Germany and the US at the intersection of architecture and geophysics. In three parts, it assesses vibration as a modern medium defining colonial and environmental contamination, cultural imperialism, and the technoscientific coupling of human and planetary bodies that waver at the edge of global war and ecological catastrophe.

Publications:

Books

  • Finkelstein, C., Hartl, C., Kessler, M.: Planetary Forest (eds.). Berlin: DISTANZ, 2024.

Book chapters

  • Finkelstein, C.: Planetary Disequilibrium (Redux), in Colomina, B., Axel, N., and Hirsch, N. (eds.): Sick Architecture. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2024. [forthcoming]
  • Finkelstein, C.: Colonial Waves from Apia to Yap: Technoscientific Network Architectures of German Expansionism in Oceania, in Falser, M. (ed.): Para-colonial - Colonial - Post-colonial. Influences and Transactions in the Architecture of Oceania. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024. [forthcoming]
  • Finkelstein, C.: Vibration als Phänomenotechnik in den Umweltkonzeptionen der Moderne, in Fehrenbach, F., Isengard, L. Micheluzzi, G. & Zumbusch, C. (eds.): Wahrnehmungskräfte - Kräfte wahrnehmen: Dynamiken der Sinne in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. [forthcoming]
  • Finkelstein, C.: The Vibration Sense: Pallaesthesia, Sensory Substitution Design, and the Reformation of a Sixth Sense in the Early Twentieth Century, in Kettler, A., & Tullett, W. (eds.): The Routledge History of the Senses. London: Routledge, 2024. [forthcoming]
  • Finkelstein, C.: Seismischer Kolonialismus, Architektur und die Triangulierung der Welt. Das Geophysikalische Samoa-Observatorium in Apia (1902-1914), in Falser, M. (ed.) Deutsch-koloniale Baukulturen: Eine globale Architekturgeschichte in 100 visuellen Primärquellen. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München, 58-61. Passau: Klinger, 2023. 

Journal articles

Interviews