Karl N. Renner was a professor of television journalism at the Department from 1995 to 2016. He was responsible for the television editorial team of the master’s program in journalism as well as for the direction of the BA program in AVP and of CampusTV Mainz. Furthermore, he supervised the international study and training partnership with the Department of Journalism at the University of Memphis (USA). He retired in the fall of 2016.

His research areas are the semiotic-pragmatic foundations of television journalism and Audio-visual Publishing, as well as narrative theory. Concerning the latter, he was a member of the research focus Media Convergence and a speaker of the working group Transmedial story-telling” (“Transmediales Erzählen) .

Karl N. Renner is a member of the German Society for Semiotics and the German Society for Journalistic and Communication Science (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft, DGPuK), where he is involved in the Visual Communication and Media Language/Media Discourse sections. In his home town of Frei-Laubersheim, Renner is involved on a voluntary basis in refugee aid and with the village museum association.

Karl N. Renner studied Modern German Literature, Film Philology, Linguistics and Formal Logic at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His academic teachers were Klaus Kanzog, Theo Vennemann, Marianne Wünsch and Michael Titzmann. Renner graduated with a master’s degree in 1978 and received his PhD in 1981 in Munich. His dissertation examined the rendering of narrative structures in literary adaptations based on a logical reconstruction of Yuri M. Lotman’s theory of boundary transgression.

From 1980 to 1985 Renner was a research assistant to Volker Hoffmann in the DFG research group “Social History of German Literature 1770 – 1900” at the LMU Munich. In addition, he was a lecturer at the universities of Munich and Bamberg. In 1995, Renner was appointed professor at the Journalism Department of the JGU Mainz.

Renner was already employed as a freelancer by Bayerischer Rundfunk during his studies, first as a film camera assistant, then as a filmmaker. From 1985 to 1995, he was a permanent freelancer at Bayerischer Rundfunk, where he worked for regional and science magazines and shot documentaries on cultural and historical topics. From 1991 to 1995 he was in charge of the science magazines EINS PLUS WISSENSCHAFT and 3satWissenschaft.