Sonja Neef studied Dutch and German Literature and Philosophy in Cologne and Utrecht. She gained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2000 as a fellow of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her Post-Doc project on handwriting as a cultural practice in the age of new media was awarded with the ›veni‹-grant (Innovational Research Incentives) from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) in 2002. She was Junior Professor of European Media and Culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, from 2003 until 2010. In her Morphomata research-project »The Stars and the West,« she investigates the impact of Occidental astronomy on ideas of cosmopolitanism as articulated in media and arts. Sonja Neef died on April 6th, 2013.