Christian Pischel holds a PhD in film studies. Most recently, he worked as a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of German, Russian and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He studied theater, philosophy and German literature at Leipzig University and Université de Lausanne and taught film, theater, and philosophy at Berlin University of the Arts Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin.

He has published on topics as varied as the Hollywood’s blockbuster cinema of the 1990ies (Die Orchestrierung der Empfindungen. Affektpoetiken des amerikanischen Großfilms der 1990er Jahre, 2013), early DEFA-films, the history of realism in film theory, and photorealism. Additionally, his research focuses on political aesthetics, propaganda, and Hannah Arendt.