Mario Wimmer
Deputy Director

Mario Wimmer helps run the Collegium Helveticum as deputy director and head of 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.

As a historian, he engaged with the question of what drives and facilitates intellectual work. Attending to overlooked real-world aspects of intellectual practice, his research offered insights into the concrete conditions and possibilities of knowledge formation.

Mario received his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Bielefeld 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. Earlier in his career, Mario also worked as a freelance curator and journalist.