Meet School of the Arts Faculty Tenured in 2022

Nico Baumbach, a School of the Arts professor, joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2022. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the leading edge of the disciplines.

Nico Baumbach is a film and media scholar who focuses on how films and other media objects have been understood to be political. He is interested both in the history of discourses that have approached this philosophical question and in developing his own critical intervention around what he has called “cinematic equality,” which refers to the many ways in which films and videos can be understood to suspend cultural logics of control or hierarchy. He is also interested in how media and cinema are changing in relation to the increasing ubiquity of computers and how our ways of seeing and expressing ourselves may be affected by these changes. His first book Cinema/Politics/Philosophy came out in 2019 with Columbia University Press and a sequel, The Anonymous Image, is currently under contract. He is also working on a short book on the relation between critical theory and conspiracy theory. 

He received his BA from Brown University in 1998, and was trained in a tradition of Continental philosophy as well as literary, media, and cultural theory at Duke University’s Program in Literature where he completed his PhD in 2009. Later that year, he joined the Film Program at the School of the Arts as an Assistant Professor.

Nico Baumbach's Faculty Profile