- Studied German, Art History and Slavic Studies at the University of Cologne

- 2003 Doctorate at the University of Cologne with a thesis on the media and knowledge history of affective images

- 2002-2004 Research assistant at the Research Centre "Media and Cultural Communication" (SFB/FK-427) at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn and Aachen

- 2005-2008 Research assistant at the Institute for Media, Information and Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg

- 2008-2011 University assistant at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna

- 2012 Habilitation at the University of Vienna with a thesis on the cultural and media history of dispersion and receipt of the Venia legendi for film and media studies

- Deputy professorships at the University of Siegen (2010), the Bauhaus University Weimar (2011-2015) and the Humboldt University of Berlin (2015, 2016-2019)

- 2015-2016 Senior Fellow at the IKKM, Bauhaus University Weimar

- 2017 Senior Fellow at the MECS, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

- 2019-2020 Project Manager at the Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity", Humboldt University of Berlin

- since May 2020 Professor for "Theory and History of Contemporary Media" at the University of Oldenburg

Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from Belowedited by Marie Sophie Beckmann and Petra Löffler, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2025.

Records of Disaster. Media Infrastructures and Climate Change, Lüneburg: meson press 2022. ( with: Jakob Claus)

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times. A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, Lüneburg: meson 2021. (with: Réka Patrícia Gál)

Materials, Practics and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (with Antje Krause-Wahl and Änne Söll), New York/London: Bloomsbury 2021.

Ecologies of the Earth - History and Topicality of the Gaia Hypothesis, Lüneburg: Meson-Press 2018 (with Alexander Friedrich, Niklas Schrape and Florian Sprenger).

Cinema labour love. Homage to Elisabeth Büttner, Berlin: Vorwerk 8 2018 (with Christian Dewald and Marc Ries).

Distributing images. Fotografische Praktiken in der digitalen Kultur, Bielefeld: transcript 2018 (with Winfried Gerling and Susanne Holschbach).

Distributed attention. Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung, Zurich/Berlin: diaphanes 2014.

Faces of Film, Bielefeld: transcript 2005 (with Joanna Barck).

Affect Images. A media history of facial expressions, Bielefeld: transcript 2004.

The face is a strong organisation, Cologne: DuMont 2004 (with Leander Scholz).

Medientheorien 1888-1933. Texte und Kommentare, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp 2002 (with Albert Kümmel).

Colonising the Ocean: Coral Reef Histories in the Anthropocene, in: Réka Patrícia Gál, Petra Löffler (eds.): Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times. A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, Lüneburg: meson 2021, pp. 185-213.

Flickering Lights. Shine and Diversion in Weimar Cinema, in: Antje Krause Wahl, Petra Löffler, Änne Söll (eds.): Materials, Practics and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture, New York/London: Bloomsbury 2021, pp. 37-52.

Images-Images: Colonial image practices and their postcolonial revenants, in: ZfM 25 (2021), pp. 116-127.

Doing things differently. Feminist Anthropocene Critique, Decolonising Geology and Sensing in Media Environments. Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff in conversation with Petra Löffler, Léa Perraudin and Birgit Schneider, in: ZfM 23 (2020), pp. 138-151.

Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice, in: Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, vol. 21, no. 35 (2020), pp. 73-83.

Counter Media Environments. Aesthetics and Geopolitics after McLuhan, in: Angelika Seppi, Rebekka Ladewig (eds.): Milieu Fragmente. Technological and Aesthetic Perspectives, Leipzig: Spector Books 2020, pp. 368-379.

Questions, in: Peter Bexte, Martina Leeker (eds.): Ein Medium namens McLuhan. 37 Interviews, Lüneburg: meson Press 2020, pp. 49-51.

Epiphanies. Two Sketches, in: Linda Simonis (ed.): Media and Religion. Approaches to an interdisciplinary research programme, Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag 2019, pp. 33-42.

Ökologien medialer Praktiken, in: Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl, Ronja Trischler (eds.): Materialität der Kooperation, Berlin: De Gryuter 2019, pp. 373-398.

Making booklets. A round table on graphic design, e-publishing and ZfM production, in: ZfM 20 (2019), pp. 53-65.

Archives of the future? A conversation about collection policies, colonial archives and the decolonisation of knowledge, in: ZfM 20 (2019), pp. 96-111.

Genealogies of Becoming Minoritarian: Cinema as 'Little Art', in: Elisabeth Büttner, Viktoria Metschl (eds.): Figurations of Solidarity. Algeria, the cinema and the rhythms of anti-colonial internationalism, Berlin: Vorwerk 8 2019, pp. 149-165.

Molecular montage and distributed attention. On leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, in: Martin Doll (ed.): Cutting Edge! Postionen zur Filmmontage, Berlin: Bertz + Fischer 2018, pp. 25-38.

Gaia's Fortune. Kosmopolitik und Ökologie der Praktiken bei Latour und Stengers, in: Alexander Friedrich et al.: Ökologien der Erde - Geschichte und Aktualität der Gaia-Hypothese, Lüneburg: Meson-Press 2018, pp. 95-121.

Narcissism as anaesthesia? McLuhan and the Age of Electricity, in: Till A. Heilmann, Jens Schröter (eds.): Understanding Media. 50 Years of McLuhan's Understanding Media, Lüneburg: Meson Press 2017, pp. 87-113.

Zig-zag. Bruno Latour's detours, in: ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, H. 4: Workarounds - Practices of the Detour, 2017, pp. 134-139.

Gesturing the Image. The Chain-linking of Images in Jean-Luc Godard's Passion, in: Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing, ed. by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes, London: Routledge 2017, pp. 33-46

Clever parallel worlds. Gods and Quantum Physics, in: Jürgen Fohrmann (ed.): Chronik/Gefühle. Seven contributions on Alexander Kluge. With three stories by Alexander Kluge and a response by Wilhelm Voßkamp, Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag 2017, pp. 119-141.

Theory-Scene(s), in: Lorenz Aggermann, Georg Döcker, Gerald Siegmund (eds.): Theatre as a Dispositif. Dysfunction, Fiction and Knowledge in the Order of Performance, Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang 2017, pp. 105-121.

Medienarchäologie und Film, in: Bernhard Groß, Thomas Morsch (eds.): Handbuch Filmtheorie, Wiesbaden: Springer VS (online: DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-09514-7_35-1).

An ecology of materials. An email interview on correspondence, resonance and obsession, and the benefits of combining scholarship and craft (with Tim Ingold and Florian Sprenger), in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, H. 14: Medienökologien, pp. 87-94.

Aesthetic Resistance. Michelangelo Antonioni's revolutionary escapism, in: escape. Strategies of Escape, ed. by Nicole Kandioler, Ulrich Meurer, Vrääth Öhner and Andrea Seier (online publication: escape.univie.ac.at/aesthetische-widerstaendigkeit/)

Dispersion. Techniques of Distribution, in: Figurationen 16th Vol. (2015), H. 2, pp. 10-26.

Ghosts of the City: A Spectrology of Cinematic Spaces, in: Communication+1, vol. 4, article 9 (http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol4/iss1/9/).

Ghosts of the City. Spectrology of urban spaces, in: 'Lernen, mit den Gepenstern zu leben'. Das Gespenstige als Figur, Metapher und Wahrnehmungs-dispositiv, ed. by Ralph Fischer and Gerald Siegmund, Berlin: Neofelis Verlag 2015, pp. 167-186.

Being in Space: Scattering, Extending, Dispersing. Towards a media ecology of the relational space, in: Journal for Media Philosophy and Cultural Technology Research, 5/2 (2014), pp. 209-223.

Zerstreuen, in: Heiko Christians, Matthias Bickenbach and Nikolaus Wegmann (eds.): Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau 2014, pp. 687-702.

The Strange Case of Bas Jan Ader. Los Angeles and the West Coast Conceptualism of the Seventies, in: Augen-Blick. Konstanzer Hefte zur Medienwissenschaft, no. 59 (2014), pp. 10-22.

At the zero point of the image. Roland Barthes' Ergography, in: Claudia Benthin, Brigitte Weingart (eds.): Handbuch Literatur und visuelle Kultur, Berlin: de Gruyter 2014, pp. 121-138.

Kleptomania. On the Pathologisation of Dispersion, in: Gabriele Dietze, Dorothea Dornhof (eds.): Metropolenzauber - Sexuelle Moderne und urbaner Wahn, Weimar/Wien: Böhlau 2014, pp. 367-388.

The Aesthetics of Dispersed Attention. An Interview with German Media Theorist Petra Löffler (interview by Geert Lovink), in: Necsus 4 (Autumn 2013), www.necsus-ejms.org/the-aesthetics-of-dispersed-attention-an-interview-with-german-media-theorist-petra-loffler/

Effacement. On the Erasure of the Face in Gilles Deleuze, in: Interjekte 4 (2013): Effacements of the Face, ed. by Mona Körte and Judith Elisabeth Weiss, pp. 87-96.

"Applying the Acumen of the Researcher to the Everyday". Daniel Eschkötter and Petra Löffler in conversation with Gustav German and Hanna Schimek, in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Heft 9 (2013), pp. 106-112.

Phase(s). On the conception of the movement image, in: Nina Lindemeyer, Pirkko Rathgeber (eds.): BildBewegungen, Munich: Fink 2013, pp. 133-156.

Sensory Deprivation and the Terror of Film, in: Julia Bee, Reinhold Görling, Johannes Kruse, Elke Mühlleitner (eds.): Folterbilder und -narrationen: Relations between Fiction and Reality, Göttingen: V&R Unipress 2013, pp. 219-234.

Bodies of Distraction, in: Bianca Maria Pirani, Thomas S. Smith (eds.): Body and Time. Bodily Rhythms and the Social Synchronism in the Information Age, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013, pp. 8-20.

Horsemanning. Mimesis of Photography, in: Archive for Media History 12 (2012), pp. 147-160.

Affekt, in: Tina Bartz, Ludwig Jäger, Marcus Krause, Erika Linz (eds.): Handbuch der Mediologie. Signatures of the Medial, Munich: Fink 2012, pp. 22-27.

Figuren des Ausdrucks in Schauspieltheorie und Medizin um 1800, in: Tobias Robert Klein, Erik Porath (eds.): Figuren des Ausdrucks. Formation einer Wissenskategorie zwischen 1700 und 1850, Munich: Fink 2012, pp. 147-167.

Ghost Sounds and the Cinematographic Imagination. Christian Petzold's Ghosts and Yella, in: Thomas Schick, Tobias Ebbrecht (eds.): Kino in Bewegung. Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms, Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag 2011, pp. 63-78.

Ecstasies of the gaze. Moments of Cinema, in: Gerald Schröder, Änne Söll (eds.): Kritische Berichte, 38th Vol. (2010), H. 4, pp. 39-48.

Picturing the Metropolis: Paris in the Eye of the Camera, in: Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, Margarete Rubik, Jörg Türschmann (eds.), Rive Gauche. Paris as a Site of Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in the 1920s, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2010, pp. 121-144.

What Hands Can Tell Us: From the 'Speaking' to the 'Expressive' Hand, in: Ludwig Jäger, Erika Linz, Irmela Schneider (eds.): Media, Culture, and Mediality. New Insights into the Current State of Research, Bielefeld: transcript 2010, pp. 367-389.

Light, trace, measurement. Kritik des fotografischen Bildes, in: Bernhard Dotzler (ed.): Bild/Kritik, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos 2010, pp. 83-114.

Coolness as a cinematic effect: Cassavetes with McLuhan, in: Annette Geiger/Gerald Schröder/Änne Söll (eds.): Coolness. On the Aesthetics of a Cultural Strategy and Attitude, Bielefeld: transcript 2010, pp. 67-83.

Risky Gestures: John Cassavetes' Opening Night (1976/77), in: Maske & Kothurn 4 (2009), pp. 61-77.

Phantoms. Encounters with the Uncertain, in: ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, no. 1 (2009), pp. 99-123.

Vertigo, hysteria, distraction. Zur Archäologie massenmedialer Wirkungen, in: Marcus Hahn, Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.): Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, Bielefeld: transcript 2009, pp. 373-399.

The Ordinary Life of Ordinary People. Edgar G. Ulmer's Menschen am Sonntag (D 1929), in: Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.): Edgar G. Ulmer. Essays on the King of the B's, Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2009, pp. 49-62.

Fluid(um). On the mediality of tears, in: Beate Söntgen, Geraldine Spiekermann (eds.): Tränen, Munich: Fink 2008, pp. 263-281.

The spectacle of photography. Posing in front of the camera - the textbooks by Carl Michel and Albert Borée, in: Fotogeschichte. Contributions to the History and Aesthetics of Photography, vol. 26 (2006), no. 101, pp. 17-30.

Fabrication of affects. Fotografien von Leidenschaft zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik, in: Ludger Derenthal, Katharina Sykora, Esther Ruelfs (eds.): Fotografische Leidenschaften, Marburg: Jonas 2006, pp. 40-56.

The film face. Die Rede vom Gesicht im frühen Film, in: Wolfgang Beilenhoff, Marijana Erstic, Walburga Hülk, Klaus Kreimeier (eds.): Gesichtsdetektionen in den Medien des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Siegen: Universitätsverlag 2006, pp. 25-51.

A visible language. Speaking mouths in silent film, in: Joanna Barck/Wolfgang Beilenhoff (eds.): Das Gesicht im Film. Secondary Stagings/2, Montage/av 13/2 (2005), pp. 54-74.

Image Industry. Die Fotografie als Massenmedium, in: Albert Kümmel/Leander Scholz/Eckhard Schumacher (eds.): Einführung in die Geschichte der Medien, Munich: utb 2004, pp. 95-123.

Affektbilder analog/digital: Mimik zwischen Mimesis und Simulation, in: Gisela Fehrmann/Erika Linz/Eckhard Schuhmacher/Brigitte Weingart (eds.): Original/Kopie. Practices of the Secondary, Cologne: DuMont 2004, pp. 156-172.

Vanishing lines of the 'face'. Krisensymptome facialer Semantik, in: Petra Löffler/Leander Scholz (eds.): Das Gesicht ist eine starke Organisation, Cologne: DuMont 2004, pp. 323-344.

Der verkehrte Krieg: Die Ikonographie von Idylle und Antiidylle in der Fotografie, in: Thomas Kater/Albert Kümmel (eds.): Der verweigerte Friede. On the loss of peace imagery in modernity, Bremen: Donat 2003, pp. 245-261.

Was Hände sagen: Von der 'sprechenden' zur 'Ausdruckshand', in: Matthias Bickenbach/Annina Klappert/Hedwig Pompe (eds.): Manus Loquens. Medium der Geste - Gesten der Medien, Cologne: DuMont 2003, pp. 210-242.

'Mimic disturbances'. On the image of the grimace, in: Albert Kümmel/Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.): Signale der Störung, Munich: Fink 2003, pp. 173-197.

'A poet looks like a chemist'. Das Gesicht in der Fotografie, in: Stefan Andriopoulos/Bernhard Dotzler (eds.): 1929. Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2002, pp. 132-157.

Fragile gestures - eccentric expressions. Eleonora Duse and the spectacle of hysteria, in: Isolde Schiffermüller (ed.): Geste und Gebärde. Beiträge zu Text und Kultur der Klassischen Moderne, Innsbruck/Wien/München: Studienverlag, Bozen: Edition Sturzflüge 2001, pp. 40-65.