Hermann Kappelhoff, born in 1959, has been a professor in the Department for Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2003. He received his PhD in 1993. His thesis on the Poetics of the Weimar Auteur Cinema was published in 1995, under the title: Der möbilierte Mensch. G.W. Pabst und die Utopie der Sachlichkeit. Ein poetologischer Versuch zum Weimarer Autorenkino. In 2001, Hermann Kappelhoff qualified as professor with a postdoctoral thesis on the cinematic melodram as a paradigm of artificial emotions, published in 2004, under the title: Matrix der Gefühle. Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit. In the 2009/10 winter semester, Prof. Kappelhoff was a Max-Kade Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA.

Since October 2015 he has been the director of Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe "Cinepoetics – Center for Advanced Film Studies“. Prior to this, he was director and principal investigator of the Excellence Cluster “Languages of Emotion" at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2007-2015, he represented Media Studies in the Council of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Research Foundation). Hermann Kappelhoff is also a staff member of the Graduate School of North American Studies and of the Dahlem Humanities Center.

Following his research in the history, theory and analysis of film and audiovisual media, Prof. Kappelhoff initiated interdisciplinary projects involving cultural studies, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, fine arts and psychology, and developed various research projects and key activities at Freie Universität Berlin.
From 2007-2014, he was head of the research projects "Die Politik des Ästhetischen im westeuropäischen Kino“ ("The Politics of Aesthetics in Western European Cinema") of the Colloaborative Research Center 626 (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste" ("Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits" in the German Research Foundation.) He has been supervising the project “Migrantenmelodramen und Einwanderungskomödien: Medienformate deutsch-türkischer Gemeinschaftsgefühle“ on media formats of German-Turkish senses of community, as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1171: “Affective Societies - Dynamics of social coexistence in mobile worlds.” In addition, since 2005, he has developed e-learning projects relating to the cinematic expression in motion ("Filmische Expressivität und Ausdrucksbewegung") and to systematic film analysis in research in teaching ("Bildräume: zur methodischen Analyse kinematographischer Darstellungsformen“).