Wolfgang Ernst (born 1959) is a German media theorist, full professor in Media Theories at the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt-University, Berlin. He studied history, Latin philology, and (partially) classical archaeology, did his Ph.D. thesis on historicism and museology and habilitation on the technical and symbolic infrastructures of national memory. He has had teaching experience and guest professorships at several universities (Kassel, Leipzig, Cologne, Weimar, Bochum, Paderborn). Other publications in English: Digital Memory and the Archive (2013); Sonic Time Machines (2016), Chronopoetics (2016). Current research fields: time-based and time-critical media processes; implicit "sonicity" in techno-mathematical media; experimenting the writing of media time in non-historiographic ways.

His current research covers media archaeology as method, theory of technical storage, technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analysis ("sonicity") from a media-epistemological point of view.

Books in English: Digital Memory and the Archive (2013); Chronopoetics. The temporal being and operativity of technological media (2016); Sonic Time Machines. Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices and Implicit Sonicity in Terms of Media Knowledge, Amsterdam (2016).