Brigitte Weingart is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media Studies & Theatre at the University of Cologne. After studying German literature, Media Studies and Political Science in Cologne, St. Louis (M.A. 1994) and Paris, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 1999 with a thesis on representations of AIDS. Before she took her current position in 2014, she was a researcher at the »Center for Media and Cultural Communication« (a collaborative project of the universities of Cologne, Aachen, Bonn and Bochum; 1999-2004), a member of the Junior faculty at Bonn University (2004-2010), a Humboldt-fellow at Columbia University in New York (2007-2009), and the recipient of a Maria von Linden-fellowship at Bonn University (2012-2013). Since 2013, she is a member of the editorial staff of »Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft«.

Research areas focus on the intersections of media history and theory, literature and popular culture. Topics include intermediality (especially text-image relations), cultural techniques of appropriation, the imagery of contagion, Celebrity Cultures, the genealogy and media aesthetics of »fascination«. 

Intimate Relations: Gossip and Celebrity in 20th Century Media and Literature

• Ansteckende Wörter. Repräsentationen von AIDS [Infectious Words. Representations of AIDS]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag 2002.
• »Celebrity Cultures«, Theme Issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Nr. 16 (April 2017) (Co-editor, with Peter Rehberg) http://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/heft.
• Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur [Companion Literature & Visual Culture]. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter 2014 (Co-editor, with Claudia Benthien; Vol. 1 in the series Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie).
• Die Kommunikation der Gerüchte [The Communication of Rumour], Göttingen: Wallstein 2008 (Co-editor, with Jürgen Brokoff, Jürgen Fohrmann and Hedwig Pompe).
• Sichtbares und Sagbares. Text-Bild-Verhältnisse [The Visible and the Speakable. Text/image relations], Köln: DuMont 2005 (Co-editor, with Wilhelm Voßkamp).
• VIRUS! Mutationen einer Metapher [VIRUS! Mutations of a Metaphor]. Bielefeld: Transcript 2004 (Co-editor, with Ruth Mayer).
• Originalkopie – Praktiken des Sekundären [Original Copy. Practices of the Secondary]. Köln: DuMont 2004 (Co-editor, with Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz und Eckhard Schumacher).
• »Faszinieren«, in: Heiko Christians, Matthias Bickenbach, and Nikolaus Wegmann (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs, Köln-Weimar-Wien: UTB/Böhlau 2015, 209-224.
• »Contact at a Distance: The Topology of Fascination«, in: Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (eds.), Interiority/Exteriority. Rethinking Emotions. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter 2014, 72-100.
• »That Screen Magnetism«: Warhol’s Glamour, in: October 132 (Spring 2010), MIT Press, S. 43-70.