Annie Ring

Annie Ring is Associate Professor of German and Film at University College London and a Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin in 2025 and 2026. She previously worked at Emmanuel College, Cambridge as Research Fellow in 2012-15 and Director of Studies in German in 2013-14. She is the author of the monographs After the Stasi (Bloomsbury, 2015), and The Lives of Others (BFI Film Classics, 2022) and co-editor of Architecture and Control (Brill, 2018), Uncertain Archives (The MIT Press, 2021) and Citational Media (Legenda Visual Culture, 2025).

She has published widely on literature and film, and cultural theories of the ‘digital’, surveillance, subjectivity and technology in journals including Surveillance & Society, Seminar, German Life and Letters, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Oxford German Studies and Paragraph, as well as in edited volumes published in the US, UK, Denmark, and Germany.

While based at the ICI Berlin, Annie Ring is writing a monograph on German cinema, surveillance and the politics of the self. Ring’s book addresses the topics of surveillance and ‘the digital’ as they are explored in contemporary German cinema, from The Lives of Others to video installations by Hito Steyerl and Brenda Lien. The book makes the case for the special affordances of German screen cultures, valuable for understanding the changing techniques of surveillance that have come along with new networked technologies.

These are the technologies that have developed since the end of the Cold War and into the current era of data-mining and the use of vast swathes personal data to train artificial intelligence. Noting how AIs are reliant on new and ever more intrusive forms of dataveillance, Ring argues that German film and video open up particularly generative lines of inquiry into how such technologies affect all of us who come into contact with them: namely by creating new codes and rubrics of behaviour for the subjects and communities who are called on to relate to one another and to machines via networked connectivity.