Emmet von Stackelberg is a historian and Lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. He studies technologies of seeing and the history of industrial capitalism. His research asks how fossil energy-fueled industrial growth came to be seen in the 20th century as inescapable and uncontroversial, probing how ideology formation operates alongside the material practices of industrial production. His primary interest is in how moving images come to dominate our visual field across the 20th century—a development that occurred through extractive and industrial processes on a global scale.
His current book project is a history of celluloid, the substance necessary to the mass distribution of moving images until the middle of the 20th century. Reconstructing the physical, intellectual, and political work needed to make cinema possible, this history shows how one strand of visual culture in the 20th century was realized through industrial and cultural struggle over a substance that resisted its own incorporation.
He received his PhD in History from Rutgers, where he was a Warren and Beatrice Susman Dissertation Completion Fellow, as well as graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He also organized the Marxism & Materialism Working Group at the Center for Cultural Analysis. Outside of the university, he has written essays for The Awl, as well as comedy pieces for newyorker.com. He occasionally DJs on the radio or at parties for his friends. His research has been supported by the Science History Institute, the British Library, the Hagley Museum and Library, Harvard University, and the History Department at Rutgers–New Brunswick. He received his AB in History & Literature from Harvard.