Mario Wimmer
Deputy Director

Mario Wimmer helps run the Collegium Helveticum as deputy director and responsible for its academic programs. His task at the Semper Observatory is to create a thriving intellectual atmosphere and initiate intellectual conversation between international fellows, academic institutions, and the wider community.

Mario’s research engages with the question of what drives and facilitates intellectual work. He contributed to the conceptual understanding of knowledge formation and exchange across the human sciences. In his publications, he developed conceptual frameworks for the historical understanding of historical imagination and time, authorship and impact, or what he calls the epistemic surroundings and afterlives of scholarship. The trajectory of his work is towards a history and theory of intellectual work in institutional context.

Mario received his doctorate in Modern History in 2010. In the same year, he was also a visiting professor at ECNU Shanghai and began a two-year postdoc position at ETH Zurich. In 2013, he joined the faculty of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley; from 2017 to 2022, he taught media studies at the University of Basel. During that time, he was responsible for managing the research group “Media of Exactitude” between Basel, Zurich, and New York.