Peter Krapp
· Professor of Film and Media Studies; English; Informatics; MusicVerifiedUniversity of California, Irvine · Film and Media Studies
Active 1996–2025
About
Peter Krapp is Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and is also associated with the Department of Music at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Over many years, he has been affiliated with the Departments of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science and of English in the Humanities. His research interests encompass secret communications and cybernetics with a focus on cryptologic history, cultural memory and media history including games, simulations, and the history of computing, as well as aesthetic communication such as title sequences and film music. Born in Switzerland, Krapp studied at Bonn University supported by the Adenauer Foundation, earned an M.Phil. from Stirling University funded by the DAAD, and completed his doctoral fellowship in literary communication theory at Konstanz University funded by the DFG before obtaining his PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2000. He has taught at the University of Minnesota in Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and English, and at Bard College, where he also taught at the Eastern Maximum Security Prison in upstate New York, before joining UC Irvine in 2004. He has held visiting appointments at numerous international institutions including Tainan National University of Art in Taiwan, Sci_Arc and Otis College of Art in Los Angeles, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, Laguna College of Art and Design, Leuphana University in Germany, UNISINOS in Brazil, the Institute for Advanced Study at Konstanz University, and Yonsei University in South Korea. His key publications include Medium Cool (2002), Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (2004), Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011), the Handbook Language-Culture-Communication (2013), Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (2024), and a forthcoming book Museums of Computing: Stewardship of Digital Heritage (London: Palgrave 2026). Krapp's personal history with computing began in 1987 with his first computer, an Apple Macintosh SE, and he has maintained a long-standing engagement with digital culture, including early web design and commentary on hacktivism. His work reflects a deep engagement with the intersections of media, technology, and cultural memory.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Computer Science
- Multimedia
- Philosophy
- Visual arts
- Art
- Advertising
- World Wide Web
- Psychology
- Telecommunications
- Business
Selected publications
Monatshefte · 2025-07-01
article1st authorCorrespondingTextual Practice · 2025-04-03
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingParallel to the history of the occult medium of telepathy, there is a media history of thought transfer, across various technologies that in turn influence the conceptual inventory of psychology and neurology, literature and psychoanalysis.
2024-12-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingReview, Democracy and Fake News: Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics
Secrecy and Society · 2023-08-10
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding2023-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingRoutledge eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Psychology
The pivotal and seductive role of violence in certain gaming genres keeps provoking both vigorous academic debate and a wide range of political reactions. Responses have run the gamut from legislation and self-regulation to empirical studies or moral panic. Games attract criticism partly due to the immersive construction of their interactive virtual space and partly due to their increasingly realistic depiction of explicit (rather than merely cartoon) violence. Different theories of violence inflect the valorization of play (with far-reaching consequences for game theory), yet while empirical psychological studies found correlations between aggression and certain games, they have not established causation. Fundamentally this issue requires us to come to terms with gaming as mere play or as a serious activity that trains players.
Monatshefte · 2023-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingSchreibenlassen. Texte zur Literatur im Digitalen . Von Hannes Bajohr. Berlin: August, 2022. 223 Seiten. €20,00 broschiert, €13,99 eBook. Hannes Bajohr investigates the generative potential of digital writing, and not only in the ten essays collected in this volume which approach “
Surveillance is pervasive: Yes, you are being watched, even if no one is looking for you
2022-07-22
preprint1st authorCorrespondingSound Studies · 2022-04-09
article1st authorCorrespondingDOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2022-11-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThere is no communications technology that does not raise epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic questions about secrecy and its history in relation to the (sometimes irreconcilable) demands of privacy, security, trust, or freedom of expression. This raises the methodological stakes for studying and teaching secret communication.
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Samuel Weber
- 5 shared
Markus Krajewski
- 5 shared
Werner Holly
- 4 shared
Simone Heekeren
RWTH Aachen University
- 4 shared
Ludwig Jäger
RWTH Aachen University
- 1 shared
Véronique Rauline
- 1 shared
Kirsten Adamzik
University of Cape Town
- 1 shared
Gustavo Daudt Fischer
Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos
Education
Ph.D., not specified
not specified
Other, not specified
not specified
Awards & honors
- Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Service, UCI (201…
- German Science Foundation (DFG) Federal Research Fellowship,…
- German Academic Exchange Fellowship (DAAD)
- Konrad Adenauer Fellowship
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information…
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