Devin Fore

Devin Fore’s work examines the media and cultural practices that connect the German and Russian avant-gardes to political movements. His first book Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (October/MIT Press, 2012), which looks at the return of mimetic figuration in the late 1920s, was awarded the Modern Language Association’s prize for the best book in German Studies. His second book Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024) moves between literature, film, photography, experimental psychology, and information theory to reconstruct the material and political milieux of the factographic avant-garde. His third book Mass Technics of the Document: Factography and Cultural Revolution (Verso Books, 2026) examines strategies of aesthetic deskilling and the massification of communication in the era of the cultural revolution. He is currently completing a shorter study History, A Procession of Peasants, which examines the pastoral impulse in the film, architecture, and urban planning of the 1920s through the lens of Engels’ Dialectic of Nature (pub. 1925). Devin also edited and wrote the introductory essay to the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s History and Obstinacy (Zone Books, 2014), a book that continues to be on his mind.

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

Devin has received 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, Devin 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.

Devin is an editor of the journals October and New German Critique as well as a contributing editor to Germanic Review and The German Quarterly. He has translated numerous texts from both German and Russian.