Sophia Gräfe

Sophia Gräfe is a cultural historian and media studies scholar.

Together with Claudia Mareis and Peter Fratzl, she is the Project Leader of Material Form Function and Curator of the ＿matter Festival 2025, which brings together a series of exhibitions and events through a network of 13 Berlin-based institutions working at the intersection of art, science and society.

Gräfe earned her MA in Cultural History and Theory from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and her BA in Media Culture from Bauhaus-University Weimar. She is a PhD candidate at HU Berlin. In her dissertation, she explores the media history of animal behavioral studies. In this context, she has been a visiting scholar at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin since March 2018, where she helped to establish the online text series Images of Nature. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue Histories of Ethology: Methods, Sites, and Dynamics of an Unbound Discipline (2022). Together with Georg Toepfer (ZfL Berlin) she published an anthology on behavior (Wissensgeschichte des Verhaltens. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, De Gruyter) in 2025.

Her academic research interests include the Visual History of Science, Useful Film, Natural History Image Collections, Surveillance Film, and Film & Animal Studies.

Before joining the Cluster as a Research Assistant in 2023, Gräfe was a Research Associate in the DFG-Heisenberg Project Transdisciplinary Networks of Media Knowledge at the Philipps-University of Marburg (2018-2023). In spring 2021, she did a remote semester as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at the History of Science Department of Princeton University (USA).

From 2015 to 2018, she held research positions at the Department of Cultural History and Theory of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and in the research area Knowledge of Life at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin (2018-2019). Gräfe was an Associate Member of the Kolleg Configurations of Film at Goethe University, Frankfurt, in 2019.

Gräfe is the Co-Chair of the Nontheatrical Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), as well as the Co-Chair of the AG Medienwissenschaft und Wissenschaftsforschung (working group Media Science and Science Studies) at the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM).

As an assistant curator and freelance writer she has worked with various media and experimental film festivals such as the transmediale festival, Werkleitz festival and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen as well as galleries and artist studios. She is chairwoman of the Richard Schoene Society for Museum History.

Her research was portrayed for the documentary film BESTIARI, ERBARI, LAPIDARI (directed by Massimo D'Anolfi, Martina Parenti, IT/CH, 2024). The documentary premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024 and was awarded the Film della Critica dal Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (SNCCI) prize and the Director's Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2024.

List of lectures and publications