Confirmed speakers

Erkki Huhtamo is Professor of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is a world renowned media scholar and a founding figure of media archaeology. He is also a major collector of items related to the early history of visual media. Professor Huhtamo has lectured worldwide, curated exhibitions, directed television programmes, and published widely in over ten languages. His most important book to date is Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (The MIT Press, 2013).

Enes Türkoğlu leads the Digital Humanities department at the Theatre Collection of the University of Cologne. He also teaches in the Department of Digital Humanities as part of the Media Computer Science study programme.His research focuses on the digitization of heterogeneous object types and explores how their practical, cultural, and historical contexts can be methodically examined and made digitally experienceable.

Franciszek Szpila is a PhD researcher in the field of Heritage Studies at the ​University of Antwerp​ ARCHES research group. In 2024 he obtained a master diploma in conservation and restoration in Kraków Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, in the Studio of Conservation and Restoration of Paintings on Paper Support. In 2025 he was granted a scholarship of Fondation Périer D’Ieteren for doctoral research. He is interested in mixed media objects and media archaeology.

Kurt Vanhoutte is professor and chair of theatre and film studies at the ​University of Antwerp. His research focuses on the interplay of performance and science. Currently, he is spokesperson-coordinator of B-magic, an EOS (Excellence of Science) programme enabling an interdisciplinary consortium to study the magic lantern and its impact as a visual mass medium between instruction and entertainment. He is also Principal Investigator in Historical Bias, a project researching ideological bias through intersectional analysis of past data (c.1800-c.1940). Vanhoutte has published many book chapters and articles in journals including Early Popular Visual Culture, Contemporary Theatre Review and Foundations of Science. 

Leen Engelen (LUCA School of Arts ) holds a PhD in Social Sciences from KU Leuven and conducts research in the field of film and media history and the history of visual culture. She published on a diversity of topics – history of cinema in Belgium, media and film during the First World War, cultures of spectacle, panorama’s and ephemera such as film posters and postcards – in several academic books and journals. She has a special interest in archives, cultural heritage and digital access. Among other projects, she collaborated with the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp and with the Heritage Department of the city of Leuven. In 2019, Leen was awarded the Annual Prize for Science Communication by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB).​

Sharvari Sastry is a theatre historian and dramaturg whose work focuses on the unruly entanglements between live performance and recorded history, with a regional and discursive focus on South Asia.  Her first book, Other Stages: A Contemporary History of Alternative Spaces in India (forthcoming, Leftword Books, 2026) approaches theatre through the rubric of space. It illustrates how contemporary performance practices in urban India are shaped by, and respond to, their geographic and cultural spatial contexts. Her second book, Staging Evidence: Past as Presence in Modern Indian Theatre, based on her PhD dissertation, and currently under revision, approaches theatre through the lens of time. It examines how modern theatre in India becomes a site for making and unmaking historical claims, especially in relation to caste, gender, and sexuality. From 2026-2029, Sharvari is appointed as a senior postdoctoral fellow at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, working on a media archaeology project titled All on the Line: Theatre, Performance and Telephony in Modern South Asia, 1890-1990, which traces the mutually constitutive history of theatre and telephony. 

Nele Wynants is associate research professor at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA), University of Antwerp, where she coordinates the Arts & Media Archaeology team. Her research focusses on the interactions between performance, media and science and their overlapping histories. She leads the EU-funded project ‘Science at the Fair: Performing Knowledge and Technology in Western Europe, 1850-1914’ (www.scifair.eu) and is series editor of Media Performance Histories (Brepols). Wynants serves on the ARIA Steering Board and is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal for the History of Knowledge.