Dr. Leonie Hunter

About

Leonie Hunter is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel. She earned her doctorate in philosophy at Goethe University and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and has held positions at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, Princeton University, the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, and Justus Liebig University Giessen.

Her project “Technologies of Social Abstraction” examines, drawing on early Frankfurt School theory, the relation between aesthetic, social, and technological abstraction. She focuses on how machine-generated decision-making appears autonomous: socially constituted datasets are presented as objective through the “black box” of neural networks. She analyzes this illusion through aesthetic theory. Her books include Drama in the Political: Hegel’s Aesthetics as a Theory of Democracy (2023) and Tragic Liberalism (2024).

Research Group: Technology, Power and Domination  (01.04.-01.06.2026)