Markus Krajewski is a full professor of media history at the University of Basel (Switzerland). He is leading the research project Assisted Thinking: A Deep History of Scholarly AI.
Born in Germany, Krajewski studied literature, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies at the University of Cologne and at the Humboldt University Berlin. After earning his PhD in 2005 at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, he was a visiting professor at the History of Science Department at Harvard University (Cambridge, US) as well as a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. After an assistant professorship at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and a visiting professorship at Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany), he joined University of Basel in 2014 as associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2017.
Research Focus
Krajewski’s research pursues a broad scope in cultural history, ranging from early modern paper practices to the façades of postwar German architecture, with a special focus on media and materialities. He has advanced our understanding of service in both analogue and digital realms by tracing the evolution from baroque chamber servants to current internet servers. He played a significant role in unearthing the concept of planned obsolescence in the history of technology by foundational archival work on the limited lifespan of light bulbs in the 1920s. Furthermore, he is instrumental in developing the method of cultural techniques in connection with algorithms (source code critique) as well as by studying the similarities between coding and cooking.
Krajewski’s current research focuses on the long history of thinking machines, which he conceives as a deeper history of artificial intelligence, a trajectory that begins with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his memory devices. He examines how the interactions between scholars and their intellectual furniture (Denkmöbel) gradually evolved into new forms and functions, anticipating and shaping current forms of AI such as large language models.
Awards and Recognition
Among numerous distinctions and fellowships, Krajewski was awarded with the Förderpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik in 2007 for his book World Projects: Global Information Before World War I (University of Minnesota Press).
Markus Krajewski portrait: © Thomas Meyer, Ostkreuz
Feature image: Dall-E with illustrations from Vincentius Placcius, De arte excerpendi. On scholarly bookkeeping, Stockholm and Hamburg, 1689