Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Beilenhoff
Studium der Slavistik und Filmwissenschaft in Bochum, Prag und Moskau. In den 1980ern Mitglied der Konstanzer Forschergruppe ‹Intermedialität und Intertextualität›. 1991 Professur für ‹Theorie und Ästhetik des Films› am Institut für Medienwissenschaft der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. 2002 / 2008 Leiter des Forschungsprojekts ‹Medialität und Körper: Das Gesicht im Film› am kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungskolleg / SFB 427 ‹Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation› (Universitäten Aachen, Bochum, Bonn und Köln). Gastprofessuren ZfL (Zentrum für Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin), RGGU (Staatliche russische Universität für Geisteswissenschaften, Moskau), EHU (Europen Humanitarian University, Vilnius) und LK (Laboratorium der Kinematographie, Tbilisi). 2008/2009 Senior Fellow am IKKM (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar).
Prof. Dr. Michael Hagner
In June 2011 Michael Hagner stayed at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He gave a lecture on the topic "Krankheit schreiben" and worked together with the members of the Mercator Research Group in a workshop. Main topics of the workshop were the future perspectives of anthropological research.
Michael Hagner is an internationally renowned scientist, well-known for his work on the history of brain research. He works at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Associate Professor Helen Verran
Helen Verran is a proponent of an empirical version of the philosophical anthropology that lies at the core of the Mercator approach to studying knowledge and culture practices. Currently she is completing a book for MIT Press Inventive Numbers/Natural Infrastructure in which circulations of environmental knowledge between distinct knowledge communities is traced. Natural scientists, policy makers, activists, politicians: all are seen to participate. In her work with the Mercator Group she will turn her attention to developing a methods text for studying such knowledge circulations/participations.
Helen Verran has taught in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia, since 1990, having spent most of the 1980s working as a science educator in Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria in West Africa. Her book Science and an African Logic, which grew from this experience won the Fleck Prize in 2003. An elaboration of the social and political agencies of numbers, it inspired her work with Aboriginal Australian landowners in Australia's Northern Territory, but also laid the foundations for her current work on environmental science knowledge.
As a Reader in HPS Helen maintains her intense involvement in research and teaching free of any obligations in university administration. She has supervised a large number of PhDs on a very wide variety of topics, currently supervising doctorates on ethnography of knowing a 'natural place'; on the digital technologies and the generative development of family intimacy; and studying risk philosophically and ethnographically, among others. At the University of Melbourne she currently teaches 'science and society', 'philosophy of biology', 'environment and knowledge', and 'knowledge in the postcolonial world'.