Lena Trüper

Lena Trüper’s research and teaching focuses on the intersections of literature, popular science, digital art, film, postcolonial studies and performance studies in the 19th and 20th century. Her current book project is an interdisciplinary study exploring the interconnections between modern hygiene and cybernetics through the narrative figure of the housefly as transmitter and noise. 

Prior to her appointment at Hamilton College, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of California Los Angeles in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and worked as researcher and curatorial assistant at several museums and cultural institutions, including the Städel Museum Frankfurt, the German Film Institute (DIF) and the Getty Research Institute.

Recent Courses Taught

Topics in German Language and Literature
From Cybernetics to AI

Research Interests

German and European studies, European film history and theory, art history, photography, media studies, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies

Distinctions

• 2026, Dissertation Year Award, UCLA
• 2025, Harry and Yvonne Lenart Graduate Travel Fellowship, UCLA
• 2024, Young Filmmakers Grant, Hessen Film & Medien, Germany
• 2021, Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA
• 2020, Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA
• 2020, Marum Fellowship, UCLA
• 2019, Programa de Apoyo a la Investigación, Centro de Estudios y Documentación MACBA, Barcelona, Spain
• 2015, Deutschlandstipendium, Ministry of Education and Research, Germany

Selected Publications

• “Cell Cultures and German Nationalism: A Visual Investigation,” in Medical Humanities in German Studies (2026)
• “Biopolitics and Superstition in Barbara Albert’s Film Böse Zellen,” in Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film (2023)
• “Opening the Cage at Hungría 74: Hungarian Artists in Argentina and Their Critical Take on the Dematerialization of Art Objects,” in Give My Regards to Those You Connect! Cultural Interactions Between South America and Eastern Europe (2022)
• “Visual Natural Metaphors of Cybernetics in Arts and Popular Culture,” in Genealogy of Popular Science: From Ancient Ecphrasis to Virtual Reality (2020)
• “No One Knows What Cybernetics Is! On Communication and Control in Art after 1945,” in The Assembled Human (2019)
• “Von Menschenbildern und Textmaschinen: Was Cyborgs im Film über den Wandel medialer Kommunikation erzählen,” in Visual Past (2016)

Appointed to the Faculty

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., Goethe Universität Frankfurt (Germany)