Dr Silke Panse, PhD, FHEA

Profile

I am a theorist with a background in practice and examine ethical and ecological, affective and aesthetic relations of humans and nonhumans in and around moving images that are often documentary. In my research I explore notions of nature in relation to ontologies of bodies and media. My research is transdisciplinary, between the disciplines of film, art, philosophy, and the environmental humanities with a particular interest in Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze and in realisms and materialisms. The works I discuss often have a documentary aspect to them, be these as moving images in the gallery or in the cinema or on television and streamed. It is the affects and affections between images, art and humans and other-than-humans that interest me, and why I find documentary moving images in (bio)diverse environments the most enriching.

My research used to be focussed on the works of specific filmmakers and artists, such as those of James Benning, about whose films I published “Men in Huts in Woods” (2018), “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics” (2015) and “Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools” (2013). But my perspective has broadened in recent years to place these and the entities that constitute “their” images into wider affective and political environments. For example, I consider violence and extinction when articulating the limits of relational flat ontologies in my essay “There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies” (2022). Last year, I published the collection Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images (2025) which explores ways in which the ethical and the material come together in moving images, art and life. It includes my chapters on “Ethical Materialities and Material Ethicalities” and “Spinoza’s Affectual Ethics: Causing, not Making.” Previously I have edited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television (2014).

At Queen Mary, my research is associated with the Centre for Film and Ethics. Presently I am working on the monograph Bodies of Natures in Bodies of Images: Towards a Biodiverse Ontology of Affects for the Posthumanities Series of the University of Minnesota Press. As part of this area of research, I have published “Der Krieg in der Black Box des Friedens: Der Tag des Spatzen mit einem Ausflug in die politische Ökologie” in the German collection Grenzfälle. Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner (2021).

Currently I am External Examiner for the MAs in Art & Ecology and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have been Reader in Film, Art and Philosophy at the University for the Creative Arts where I was the director of the research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics. I taught in the Fine Art department of the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London; in the Film Studies department of the University of Kent and in the Media Studies department of the Royal Holloway College, London. In received my PhD from the Film Studies department of the University of Kent at Canterbury and my Diploma with distinction in Film from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg.

Research

Research Interests:

• Film, Art and Media Theories  
• Continental Philosophy (especially Spinoza and Deleuze) 
• Natures and Bodies 
• Affects, Affections and Relations 
• Documentary 
• Realisms 
• Materialisms 
• Critical Ecology 
• Aesthetics 
• Ethics 

Publications

Books and edited works 

Bodies of Natures in Bodies of Images: Towards a Biodiverse Ontology of Affects (forthcoming in the Posthumanities series of the University of Minnesota Press) 

Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), 304 pp. 

‘Part III. Work’ in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds. (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 146-207. 

A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television. Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 298 pp. 

Selected articles and book chapters 

“Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? Day of the Sparrow with an Excursion into Political Ecology and Spinoza” (forthcoming in Discourse. Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture). 

“Introduction: Ethical Materialities and Material Ethicalities” in Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), pp. 1-33.  

“Spinoza’s Affectual Ethics: Causing, not Making” in Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), pp. 37-72.  

“There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies” in the issue “Violence: Environment,” PARSE. Journal for Artistic Research, Issue 15 (Spring 2023), selected by Steven Henry Madoff for a curated PARSE edition of archived texts in April 2026. 

“Der Krieg in der Black Box des Friedens: Der Tag des Spatzen mit einem Ausflug in die politische Ökologie” in Grenzfälle. Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner, Nicole Wolf, ed., Dokumentarfilminitiative, Positionen und Perspektiven des künstlerischen Dokumentarfilms, Band 23 (Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2021), pp.133-154. 

 “The Harvest: Of Cows, Cryptocurrencies, and Machines in Images,” Docalogue, eds. Jamie Baron and Kristen Fuhs (March 2020). 

“Men in Huts in Woods: Independence, Transcendentalism and Technology in James Benning’s Thoreau and Kaczynski Documentaries and Exhibition” in James Benning’s Environments. Politics, Ecology, Duration, Nicolaj Lübecker and Daniele Rugo, eds. (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 95-113.  

“Introduction to Work” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds. (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 147-154.  

“The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds., (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 155-175.  

 “The Work and the Rights of the Documentary Protagonist” in Marx at the Movies: Revisiting History, Theory and Practice, Ewa Hanna Mazierska and Lars Kristensen, eds., (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 171-197.  

“Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction,” co-written with Dennis Rothermel, A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, in Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds., (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1-30.  

“The Judging Spectator in the Image” in A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 33-70.  

“Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools: Structure, Immanence and Eco-aesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films” in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds. (Berghahn, 2013), pp. 37-59.  

“Land as Protagonist. An Interview with James Benning” in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds. (Berghahn, 2013), pp. 60-70.  

“Flora,” brochure for the symposium Screening Nature: Flora, Fauna and the Moving Image I co-curated with Anat Pick (Queen Mary, University of London and Whitechapel Gallery, 2013). 

“What Drawings Can Do That Films Can’t,” Blind Movies catalogue, Anna Lucas, ed. (Ruskin School of Drawing, 2009).  

“Collective Subjectivity in The Children of Golzow vs. Alienation in Western Interview Documentary” in Rethinking Documentary, Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong, eds., (Open University Press, 2008), pp. 67-81.  

“‘The Bullets confirm the Story told by the Potato:’ Materials without Motives in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” in Reading CSI: Crime Television Under the Microscope, Michael Allen, ed. (I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 155-168.  

“The Filmmaker as Rückenfigur, Documentary as Painting: Alexandr Sokurov in Elegy of a Voyage” in Third Text, No. 78, Vol. 20, Issue 1 (January 2006), pp. 9-25. 

“Beruf: Neonazi,” “Hartmut Bitomsky,” “Winfried and Barbara Junge,” “Eberhard Fechner” and “Alexandr Sokurov” in The Encyclopaedia of the Documentary Film, Ian Aitken, ed. (Taylor & Francis, 2005).  

Review of The New Documentary: A Critical Introduction in Film Studies: An International Review, Issue 3 (Spring 2002).