Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The end of communist regimes across central and eastern Europe, including Russia and the other republics of the former USSR, led not only to the redrawing of the political map of Europe, but as importantly, to the reconfiguration of the intellectual and cultural worlds of this vast region. From the perspective of the past thirty years, we can better appreciate the extent of these cultural and intellectual revolutions, which have led to increased and improved communication and cooperation among artists and intellectuals across national boundaries even as political relations have faltered—in some cases catastrophically. Nowhere has this shift been more evident than in film and media studies. Founded in 2015, Apparatus is a peer-reviewed, online, Open Access (OA) scholarly journal based in Berlin, which received its initial funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The journal is hosted by Freie Universität Berlin. Its core leadership team consists of its founder and editor-in-chief Natascha Drubek (Germany), publishing director Irina Schulzki (Belgium), IT director John-Thomas Eltringham (Germany), reviews editor Evgeniia Trufanova (US), English language editor John Leman Riley (UK), and editorsat-large Adelheid Heftberger (Germany), Mario Slugan (UK), and Denise J. Youngblood (US). The journal’s international, interdisciplinary character is also evident in the composition of its editorial advisory board of twenty scholars specializing in various aspects of visual and media cultures as well as in more traditional humanities disciplines like history and literature; the board represents many European countries as well as the UK and US.