Communicating Ice through Popular Art and Aesthetics

Dr Anne Hemkendreis is a Lecturer at the research collaboration (SFB 948) Heroes - Heroizations - Heroism at the University of Freiburg (Germany). Her current book project examines the aesthetic and affective dimension of ice and snow in paintings, artistic performances and installations. Starting with the peak of the polar conquests around 1900, her project is dedicated to the development of snowscapes as an independent genre of art, the function of ice in contemporary feminist art and its agency in communicating climate change. Prior to this, Anne's PhD thesis explored the interior paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (Fink Verlag, 2015). Anne also worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Assistant at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg of Greifswald, the Klassik Stiftung of Weimar and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (all in Germany). She functioned as a Lecturer at different institutions, including the University of Arts in Berlin
Dr Anna-Sophie Jürgens is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Science Communication at the Australian National University exploring science in popular entertainment and pop culture. She has published on circus fiction and aesthetics, the history of (violent) clowns, comic mad scientists, clown robots, the cultural meanings of science, and comic performance and technology in culture in numerous academic journals. She was an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the Australian National University and the Freie Universität Berlin from 2017 to 2020. She is the guest editor of two special themed journal issues on popular performance and science (Journal of Science & Popular Culture, 2020) and violent clowns (Comedy Studies, 2020), co-editor of Manegenkünste: Zirkus als ästhetisches Modell (transcript, 2020) and the sole editor of the volume Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation (Palgrave, 2020). Her next co-edited book, Circus and the Avant-Gardes, will appear in 2022.