About - Kurt Fendt
Dr. Kurt Fendt teaches digital humanities and media studies subjects in CMS/W and a range of upper-level German Studies courses in Global Studies and Languages. He is also the Director of the Active Archives Initiative. Fendt has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; in 2001 he was Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
Formerly the Executive Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, Fendt is co-Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded “Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students,” the "US-Iran – Missed Opportunities" project, and a number of other digital humanities projects. He is co-Principal Investigator of the d'Arbeloff-funded "Metamedia" project, co-Director of "Berliner sehen", a collaborative hypermedia documentary for German Studies, and co-author of the French interactive narrative "A la rencontre de Philippe" (CD-ROM version). In 2005 he founded the MIT Short Film Festival which he directed until 2016.
Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993. He holds an M.A. from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.
