Devin Fore

Professor of German
Department Chair
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Courses Offered

Spring 2024

GER 523

Topics in German Media Theory & History: The Modes of Documentary: Epistemic, Didactic, Aesthetic, Forensic

Profile

Fore’s first book Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (MIT, 2012), which investigates the return of mimetic figuration in late 1920s, was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best work in German Studies. His next book Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism will appear with the University of Chicago Press in fall 2024. He recently completed a third book, Mass Technics of the Document, on practices of epistemic deskilling and the massification of literature and art during the cultural revolution. Fore is currently working on History, A Procession of Peasants, a short study that explores the pastoral impulse in the film, architecture, and urban planning of the 1920s through the lens of Engels’ Dialectic of Nature (pub. 1925).

In addition to publishing articles in the journals New German Critique, October, Configurations and Grey Room, Fore edited and wrote the introductory essay to the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s History and Obstinacy (Zone Books, 2014), and has translated a number of texts from both German and Russian.

The international exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, which he curated with Matthew Witkovsky, ran at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. The same year he curated a 28-session film series on Vertov and materialist cinema at the Reina Sofia/Filmoteca Española in Madrid. 

Fore has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, Humboldt and Whiting Foundations, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities; he was also the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2008–2009.

With Beatriz Colomina, Fore currently directs Princeton’s Program in Media & Modernity and he chairs the Committee for Film Studies. He is an Associate Faculty member of the departments of Art and Archaeology, Comparative Literature, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and he serves on the executive committees of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and the Center for Digital Humanities; he is also affiliated with the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Fore is an editor of the journals October and New German Critique as well as a contributing editor to Germanic Review and The German Quarterly.