Florian Zappe is a Berlin-based scholar and academic who works in the interdisciplinary borderland between literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy. He holds a M.A. in American Studies, Comparative Literature and Modern History from Freie Universität Berlin and a Ph.D from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies.
Being situated at the crossroads of cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy, his research covers a broad range of subjects. Focussing on the intricate entanglements of artistic practice (across all media) and questions of power he has worked, among other things, on the epiphanic qualities of experimental aesthetics in literary and visual culture, on the epistemological and ethical complexities inherent in surveillance culture and on film as a medium of philosophical reflection. Currently, Zappe is working on a book on the cultural and intellectual history of atheism in America.
From 2008-2011, Florian Zappe’s doctoral research has been funded with an Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes Berlin. He was a participant in the Fulbright American Studies Institute at San Francisco State University in 2014, a visiting scholar at the University of Warsaw (funded by an "Erasmus+" Mobility Grant) in 2016 and at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 2018. In 2019, he was a Fellow in Residence at the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche in Weimar.