Sonja Neef, geb. 1968 in Koersel/B, Kultur- und Medienwissenschaftlerin, Literaturstudium in Köln und Utrecht/NL, war mehrere Jahre an der Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis tätig. Ihre Dissertation (Amsterdam 2000) wurde mit dem ASCA-grant, ihr Forschungsprojekt über Handschrift mit dem veni-Preis der niederländischen Forschungsgemeinschaft honoriert. Seit 2003 arbeitet sie als Juniorprofessorin für Europäische Medienkultur an der Fakultät Medien der Bauhaus Universität Weimar.

Astroculture is a testament to the literary imagination and theoretical innovation of the late Sonja A.J. Neef, who devised the term as an expanding horizon of collaborative research into the powerful gravitational force exerted on culture by astronomical phenomena and imagery. It is also the name of a conference on the topic inspired by Neef and held at the Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne in November, 2011. Indeed, Astroculture is a perfect instance of a morphome, the overall target of the Cologne College's ongoing symposia: a persistent trope or topos of cultural fascination and transcription appearing across a gamut of civilizations and historical periods. Commentary in this volume ranges from Claudius Ptolemy's mapping of the universe and the emergence of a pluralistic cosmology in seventeenth-century Europe to the spread of planetariums, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the contemporary artwork of Ingo Günter. With interventions by David Aubin, Lucía Ayala, Monika Bernold, Dietrich Boschung, Bruce Clarke, Gerd Graßhof, Hans-Christian von Hermann, Martina Leeker, Patricia Pisters, and Henry Sussman.