Kurt Fendt
Dr. Kurt Fendt is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Comparative Media Studies, where he taught courses in digital humanities, media and museum studies. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne and the Technical University of Aachen in Germany, as well as at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and served as a Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in 2001.
Formerly the Executive Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, Fendt is currently co–Principal Investigator of the Connected History Project (CHiP)/Lumina at the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. CHiP is developing an AI-supported research platform for historians, with a particular focus on historical documents from the German occupation of Prague. He has also served as co–Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded “Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students,” the “US–Iran – Missed Opportunities” project, and several other digital humanities initiatives. In addition, he was 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 À la rencontre de Philippe (CD-ROM). In 2005, he founded the MIT Short Film Festival, which he directed until 2016.
Before joining MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. in modern German literature from the University of Bern in 1993, with a dissertation on hypertext and text theory, and holds an M.A. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) in Germany.
