Johannes von Moltke is a professor of German studies, film, televison, and media at the University of Michigan. His main fields of research are film, critical theory, and German cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (2015) and No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (2005) as well as numerous contributions in New German Critique, Cultural Critique, October, Cinema Journal, and German Studies Review. Together with Gerd Gemünden he edits the book series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual. Currently, von Moltke is working at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg on a project on the role of critical theory in “postcritical” times.

The keynote address "The Meme is the Message: Alt-Right/Neue Rechte and the Political Affordances of Social Media" is a Distinguished Lecture within the cooperation between the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the German Studies Association (GSA). Johannes von Moltke is currently the president of the GSA. The GSA is the largest North American association of scholars, experts, and students working on the history, literature, culture, politics, and economics of German-speaking countries. Through the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin supports North American junior scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are conducting research on Germany and Europe. To date, approximately 350 researchers, including Johannes von Moltke, have received grants. Most of them teach at major universities. With their teaching, research, and publishing activities, they make a significant contribution to the understanding of Germany and Europe in North America.