Ella
Klik

Dr. Ella Klik is a new faculty member in the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her areas of expertise are media theory, materiality, and aesthetics.

Specifically, her research deals with technological innovation and traces the emergence of media economies shaped by storage space constraints, which are mitigated by a host of reusable design strategies.

As an Azrieli Fellow, Ella will extend her research into the contemporary tech landscape by combining historical approaches to studying analog recording technologies with an analysis of emerging storage solutions, such as commercial server farms in orbit and undersea, DNA storage, and blockchain. Ultimately, her aim is to critically examine the underlying assumptions and values that fuel future visions of data storage as unencumbered by physical limitations.

Ella received her PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she explored the “life” cycle of media: from engineering to production, use, and, eventually, discard. She has held fellowships in various institutions worldwide, including the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, NYU Shanghai, the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. All of these interdisciplinary spaces and the colleagues she has encountered throughout her academic journey have contributed to her intellectual fascination with the ways in which media shape our present and, no less crucially, our futures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ella enjoys consuming science fiction books and films in her spare time.