Madeleine Span is a sociologist of culture and art at the Department of Media Theory.

She leads the FWF-funded ESPRIT project Artistic Research and the Digital Sphere. Work Practices, Identity Building and Positioning (Grant DOI 10.55776/ESP3180326). In this project, she investigates the working realities, identity concepts, and digital affordances of artistic researchers.

Span studied Finnish Studies, German Philology, and Sociology (University of Vienna) and earned her PhD at the Department of Cultural Studies (University of Applied Arts Vienna) with a dissertation on Self-Publishing, The Society of Singularities and the Digital Literary Sphere. Her dissertation was supported by a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and received the Award of Excellence from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF).

Furthermore, she co-developed the video game Wetter and was responsible for its narrative design and worldbuilding.