Brían Hanrahan

Brían Hanrahan works on film, media and cultural history, focusing on the history of acoustic media, German and European cinema and the culture of the Weimar Republic. He has published on a range of subjects including the early history of the mobile microphone, avant-garde sound montage, Walter Benjamin and E.A. Dupont. His current book project, The Vivid Thing in the Air: Liveness and Location in Weimar Media, is both a cultural history of location sound and an essay on the historical significance of electro-acoustic indexicality. Hanrahan has a PhD in German Studies from Columbia University. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Whiting Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.