Sebastian Köthe

Sebastian Köthe holds a diploma in Screenwriting from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) and studied Cultural History and Theory as well as Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. He received his PhD from the graduate program Knowledge in the Arts at Berlin University of the Arts with a dissertation entitled Witnessing Guantánamo (Guantánamo bezeugen), published by Transcript Verlag in 2023 and awarded the Cultural Studies Society’s prize for the best dissertation.
Alongside his academic work, he has worked as a writer for the theatre collective copy & waste and as a freelance educator and editor for Schaubude Berlin and the Fonds Darstellende Künste. He curated the exhibition über Guantánamo hinaus (Humboldt University Berlin, 2024) and edited the anthology Gedichte aus Guantánamo (Matthes & Seitz, 2022), which was selected twice for the SWR Best Books List.
From 2022 to 2025, he was a research associate at the Research Focus Aesthetics of the Zurich University of the Arts. Since 2025, he has been a research associate in Contemporary History at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Schwacher Trost im Angesicht der Shoah. His research focuses on the interrelations of violence, resistance, and survival; the politics and epistemologies of the arts; theories of witnessing; and the history of emotions.