Katharina Ren is a cultural scholar with an award-winning dissertation, specialised in cultural and media history, illusionist entertainment culture, film and series, and Gothic cinema. She was awarded a doctoral degree by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for a dissertation on late 19th-century stage illusionism. Her work has been published in four languages. She has served as a peer reviewer for several international journals; has taught in BA and MA programmes, and supervised seminar papers and theses at five universities in Germany and Austria.
Rein, Katharina, 'Invocation de la Vie: Les Automates Magiques', transl. by Mireille Berton, in L'Outre-humain. Automates, performances mécaniques et cultures spectaculaires au seuil du XXe siècle, ed. by Mireille Berton and Stéphane Tralongo (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2025), pp. 137–155
Rein, Katharina, Techniques of Illusion. A Cultural and Media History of Stage Magic in the Late Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2023)
Rein, Katharina, 'Sawing People in Half. Sensationalist Magic Tricks and the Role of Women on Stage in the Early Twentieth Century', in Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity. A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective, ed. by Alberto Gabriele (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 163–91
Rein, Katharina, 'Magicians and Early Cinema', in A History of Cinema Without Names/2, ed. by Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, and Leonardo Quaresima (Mimesis, 2017), pp. 169–178
Rein, Katharina, 'Mind Reading in Stage Magic: The "Second Sight" Illusion, Media, and Medi-ums', Communication+1, 4.1/8 (2015), doi: 10.7275/R50C4SPB