Fabian Kröger is a cultural scientist and historian of technology, specialized in the field of mobility studies. His main research field is the cultural and technical history of the automobile. He published on the automobile in film, the imaginary of autonomous driving, the future of the automobile and the car as vision machine. His PhD-thesis focused on the relations between cultural images and scientific knowledge of car accidents in France and the United States. His articles had been published in German, English, French and Czech.
He was fellow of a project on autonomous driving funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation. As assistant researcher at the media studies department of Paderborn University he supervised a journal issue on the gender dimension of autonomous driving. The imaginary of trains in cinema was another topic he explored for the French think-tank Forum Vie Mobiles in Paris. For seven years he was member of the Editorial board of Transfers – Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility studies.
Funded by the University of Bundeswehr Munich, he wrote the first monograph on the research history of autonomous driving, covering five decades of research in the US, Japan and Europe. The book gives insights into the long-term research efforts in the field of vehicle automation, mobile robots and artificial intelligence.
What I’ve done in the past – key accomplishments & experiences:
- Academia: Binational PhD in History & Culture, written in German and French / Research projects: History of autonomous driving (Daimler Benz Foundation & Federal Ministry of Defence) and representation of the railway in film (Forum Vies Mobiles SNCF).
- Journalism: 15 years’ experience, covering Science & Technology, Mobility, War (~ 90 articles)
- Public speaking: 23 talks / three languages / five countries (US, Japan, NL, FR, DE)
- Management: Conference on the Imaginary of Technology (with ENSCI, MINES ParisTech, Univ. Paris 1-Sorbonne)
- Content Editing: Journal Issue on Gender & Mobility / Image Editor: Management & treatment of images
- Graphics Design & Artistic Production: Creation of 20 masks 🦄, 11 websites, posters, flyers, book layout.
- Multicultural Experience: German-French citizen, living since 2006 in France
What I offer
Hard skills
- Research, analysis, synthesis / writing, publishing, editing / visual creation
- Trilingual (German, English, French)
- Academic expertise (Culture, Medias, Technology, Mobility)
- Artistic sensibility & skills: photography, web design, sculpting and painting/drawing
Soft skills
- Ideas, imagination. Seeking depth. Paying attention to details
- Patient, perseverant
- Open, optimistic, diplomatic
- Communication: Able to listen to others. Sense of humor
- Enjoying to work with people from different cultural backgrounds
- Curious, happy to learn new things
Academic expertise & research fields
- Imaginary of technology & culture: Relationship between history, representations, technology and society
- Technical and cultural history of the automobile, especially autonomous driving
- Foresight: future trends, especially mobility / new technologies & innovation
- Visual culture: Semiotic analysis of images, especially film
- Cultural Insights and Cultural shifts : Transformations of Culture & Technology & Society / History: Identification of pivotal years
- History of the research on car accidents & pictorial history of car accidents in film, photography, art
- Transnational Comparison
- Qualitative research
Education
2016 | PhD in History of Technology and Cultural Science, Centre d’Histoire des Techniques, Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (IHMC), CNRS, ENS, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Humboldt University of Berlin:
Image history and history of knowledge of the car accident
Supervised by Prof. Anne-Françoise Garçon, (France) and Prof. Hartmut Böhme (Germany).
2009 | M.A. in Cultural Science, Political Science and Gender Studies, Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin, Germany:
Car Crash Culture – Der Autounfall und die Transformation des automobilen Versprechens
Supervised by Prof. Hartmut Böhme and Prof. Christian Kassung, Institute for Cultural Theory, Humboldt University of Berlin.
What is driving me
I am motivated by the aim to bring different worlds together – crossing the boundaries between
- academia and industry,
- humanities and hard sciences,
- texts and images,
- content and form.
Every project I worked on had a transnational framework. I really love to work in-between different languages (English, French, German) and countries (France, Germany, US, Japan, Sri Lanka…)
If you need a new team member with cultural research and visualization skills, please feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or ✉️ e-mail:
Detailled CV on request.
Short Bio
Born in 1975 in Berlin, Fabian Kröger studied Cultural Studies, Political Science, and Gender Studies while working as a freelance journalist (1995–2010). His early expertise focused on biotechnology and neuroscience, particularly the cultural representation of genetic research. In 2002, he co-edited a book on these topics.
In 2003, he shifted his focus to the history and future of the automobile, exploring self-driving technology, car design, and cinematic representations of cars. In 2006, he moved to Paris for an internship at Peugeot-Citroën-Renault, researching the vision of accident-free driving and technological acceptance. In Paris, he met his wife, whose Sri Lankan background led him to cover the Sri Lankan civil war (2007–2011) for German online media.
After completing his M.A. (2009) at Humboldt and Freie University Berlin, Kröger pursued a binational PhD (Sorbonne/Humboldt, 2010–2016) on car accident research and its cinematic representation. His work was featured at the Paris Motor Show (2012). He co-organized an international conference on cultural imaginaries of technology (2013) and co-edited an anthology in 2018.
Beyond academia, Kröger worked with think tanks and industry leaders on mobility studies. As a Daimler and Benz Foundation Fellow (2013–2015), his essay on autonomous driving reached over 250,000 readers and inspired a museum exhibition (2020–2022). He also contributed to Forum Vies Mobiles (2013–2017) on the cultural perceptions of rail travel.
After completing his PhD in 2016, Kröger wrote a monograph on the global history of autonomous driving in the United States, Japan and Europe (1950–2000), supported by Bundeswehr University Munich, released by Springer in April 2024. His research has been published in academic journals, books and the press.