PostDoc Fellow

My research focus is on the history of archaeological and ethnographic collections. After completing my PhD in art history at the University Paris-Sorbonne on the history of the collections of the department of coins and medals at the National Library in Paris, I began to consider questions of representation in the display of contested, translocated objects. My principal case study concerns the so-called Benin bronzes and the visual, narrative, and interpretative changes made by museums to their display in the past few decades. My current project for translocations is called “A Twentieth Century History of Absence and Presence in Benin City: Presentations and Representations of Objects Looted in 1897".

bodenstein@tu-berlin.de

T +49 30 314 24307
 

Student Assistant

2012 - 2017 Bachelor in philosophy and art history at FU-Berlin and Università di Torino | since 2017 Master in art history at TU-Berlin | since 2017 student research assistant in DFG-funded project „Johann David Passavant in Paris und Rom. Eine Briefedition” at TU-Berlin | since 2017 student research assistant in Translocations-project „Nationales Kulturgut transnational. Gesetzliche Regelungen zum Kulturgüterschutz in historischer Perspektive”

luca.alexander@web.de

PostDoc Fellow

Dr. Gidena Mesfin Kebede is a researcher in Ethiopian studies. His current postdoctoral research at the Technische Universität Berlin in the Department for Modern Art History at the Institute of Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies under the translocations project focuses on the reconstruction of the manuscript holdings of an Ethiopian national library looted by the British in 1868. He received his PhD from the Universität Hamburg, Germany. His research interests include Ethiopian philology, Ethiopian manuscript studies, Ethiopian history, languages and literature, and English language teaching. In his spare time, he writes poems in Amharic and Tigrinya (two major Semitic languages of Ethiopia) and aspires to publish his collection. In Ethiopia, he served as an English lecturer at Mekelle University and later held the Chair of the Philology Program Unit at Addis Ababa University. In 2012, he won a PhD scholarship from the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe at the Universität Hamburg, where he received his PhD.

gidena.m.kebede@tu-berlin.de

T +49 30 314 24307

Project Coordination

Merten studied theatre studies, German literature, and art history with a focus on museum history. His research interests include the postwar history and theory of architecture, queer practices, and conceptual and discourse history. From 2014 to 2017, he worked as a student assistant at the Department of Modern Art History, TU Berlin, where he assisted in the organization of various project seminars and conferences and the editorial supervision of publications. Merten will be the project coordinator for translocations.

lagatz@tu-berlin.de

T + 49 (0)30 314 25016

Student Assistant

Nathalie Okpu studies art history, cultural studies, and sociology at the Technische Universität Berlin and holds a degree in communications design. In addition to being a self-employed stylist and graphic designer, she also has experience in art education through the project "Team Dialog" of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Her focus lies on photography and art with transcultural, decolonial and post-digital backgrounds. Further interests include provenance and display of looted art, digital art history, and visual culture. She has been part of the translocations team as a student assistant since Fall 2017.

n.okpu@campus.tu-berlin.de

PostDoc Fellow

Dr. Ji Young Park studied art history and French literature at Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea (1998-2003) and acquired 2nd cycle diplomas in museology from École du Louvre in Paris (2005 and 2007). In Los Angeles, US, she worked as a graduate intern in the museum education department of the J. Paul Getty Museum (2007/8) and joined the Korean gallery reopening project at LACMA as curatorial assistant (2008/9). She recently received her PhD (Dissertation: The National Museum of Korean Art, a device for the transmission of Korean arts' values and knowledge: Museological Analysis of Mise en Exposition of Saranbang in National Museums in the Republic of Korea) from the International doctorat program of École du Louvre, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse and Université de Québec à Montréal.
Within the translocations Cluster she is in charge of the glossary. Her translocations case study is "Museographical discourse analysis of the Otani Collection exhibition at the National Museum of Korea (NMK) in Seoul".

j.park@tu-berlin.de

T +49 30 314 28688

Student Assistant

Simon Lindner studies art history and philosophy in Berlin. 2015 to 2018 - student assistant at the Institute for Art and Visual History / Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Technology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Autumn semester 2016 - Erasmus studies at the University of Basel. March 2018 - B.A. (with a thesis on the sea as a future space in Art Nouveau and Wilhelminism) at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since July 2018 - student assistant in the department of Modern Art History at the Technical University of Berlin.


Study interests: Visual arts and architecture from the 19th century to the present, art theory, displacement of cultural assets, the history of science.

s.lindner@tu-berlin.de

translocations Antenne Paris

Léa Saint-Raymond joined the translocations team as an ATER, at the Collège de France. She co-organizes the project’s Parisian research seminar and aids in the building the structure of the online datasets. She also studies the marketing of displaced cultural assets in her own research: she is currently writing a PhD dissertation about the Parisian auction market from the 1830s through 1939, focusing on the values of modern art, Asian and „primitive” artifacts, compared to the Old Masters market. Alumna of the École normale supérieure, agrégée in economic and social sciences, she received a double training in economics and art history.

lea.saint-raymond@college-de-france.fr

Project Direction

Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy received her doctorate in 2000 as a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for a thesis on Napoleon's art looting in Germany. Since 2003, she has been a junior professor and since 2009, Professor for Modern Art History at the Institute for Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies at TU Berlin. She is a member of many committees and scientific advisory boards and received the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2016. Bénédicte Savoy is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and was appointed professor at the Collège de France (Paris) in 2016.

benedicte.savoy@tu-berlin.de

PostDoc Fellow

Dr. Robert Skwirblies studied history, art history, and political and communication sciences in Berlin and Rome. In his research, he deals with the history of museums and art collections, political representation and social art history of the 18th and 19th centuries. Since 2015, he has been a research assistant at Technische Universität Berlin, where he is associated to the research clusters Transnational History of Museums and the Centre for Art Market Studies. His PhD (published in 2017) analyses the reception of and the market for Italian Renaissance paintings in Germany, especially in Berlin, between 1797 and 1830, which focused on cultural policy, the art trade, and personal networks in post-revolutionary Europe.

Within the translocations cluster he is responsible for the text anthology, his project is “The formation of ‘our heritage’ – defining, exploiting and protecting cultural assets in 18th-19th century Europe.” In addition to his translocations research project, he is finishing a scholarly edition of the letters written by and addressed to the painter and art historian Johann David Passavant from 1807 to 1824 (2015-8), directed by Bénédicte Savoy.

robert.skwirblies@tu-berlin.de

T + 49 30 314 28688

Project Direction

Eyke Vonderau is the research coordinator at the Institute forchair of Modern Art History and supports Prof. Savoy in the strategic development of the department and its research projects. He manages the planning of projects and applications for funding, as well as the budget of the department. He holds a master’s degree in history from  the Humboldt Universitäty Berlin. Before joining Prof. Savoy’s team in 2015,  heand has worked as the coordinator of the International Graduate Research Program Berlin - New York - Toronto "The World in the City"  (DFG/GRK-1705) and as a research assistant at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the TU Berlin., before he joined the team of Prof. Savoy in 2015.

vonderau@tu-berlin.de

T + 49 30 314 23750

PreDoc Fellow

I graduated in science of history with my Master thesis about "The German art policy in the Orient during the First World War. On the role of the German-Turkish Command for the Protection of Monuments in the Ottoman Empire - Art Protection or Art Looting?”. 
Hereafter I focussed on the valorisation of antique objects, the instrumentalisation of cultural heritage and the translocation of antiquities within the 19th and 20th century with a regional emphasis on the Ottoman Empire. In the context of translocations I work on „Cultural Imperialism versus Protectionism? The Role of Antiquities as a Matter of Conflict within the German and Ottoman Art Policy during the First World War“. 

sebastianwillert@yahoo.de

Andrea Meyer studied art history, theatre science, and North American studies in Bochum, Berlin, and New York, obtaining her Master’s degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1999. She worked for research projects on art patronage and on artistic relations between Germany and France 1870-1940 before she joined the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies in 2003. She received her PhD with a dissertation on Germany and Millet in 2007. Andrea was visiting scholar at the Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi in 2009 and had teaching assignments for the master’s program Curatorial Studies at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt (2011/12) and at New York University Berlin (2013 and 2014).

Anna Pushakova is a researcher who specializes on the history of museum collections in the USSR. She obtained her MA in Art history from the Russian State University for Humanities in 2014. From 2013 to 2018 she was working as a keeper of Japanese and Chinese collection in the The State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow). She curated several exhibitions, including ‘The Helmsmen of the Revolution’ dedicated to the 100 year anniversary of Russian Revolution in 2017. In 2017-2018 she started to work as a lecturer in the Moscow at Moscow City University focusing on East Asian art history (Chinese and Japanese art). Her interests include museology, collection history and provenance research with a focus on the Eastern European art market.

Dr. Anne Luther is a researcher and software developer whose work examines the contemporary art market and data visualization in qualitative research. She received her PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and is currently a researcher at the Department for Modern Art History at the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies at TU Berlin and at The Center for Data Arts at The New School in New York. She assisted Professor Boris Groys at New York University between 2014-2017. Her research is grounded in cultural studies, digital humanities and art theory bridging an interdisciplinary approach to IT, software engineering, and design. Her practice as a curator informs her research with an expert knowledge in the production, circulation, and consumption of art. She is the co-founder of The International Art Market Association Sub-Committee in Berlin.

a.luther@tu-berlin.de

Christine is researcher, lecturer, and coordinator of the research area "Art Market and Provenance." She holds a PhD in history. Before joining the team of Bénédicte Savoy, she was deputy director of the Academic Evaluation Center (German Embassy, Beijing) from 2007 to 2010 and, until 2013, visiting scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Her research interests lie in the area of international art market studies, non-European art in Western collections, and provenance research with a focus on East Asia. She currently works on the development of East Asian art dealership and collections in Europe (1842-1939). Since 2016, she has also been an associated researcher at the Berlin Museum für Asiatische Kunst with a provenance research project on selected museum acquisitions. In 2017, she was selected member of the German-American Exchange Program (PREP).

c.howald@tu-berlin.de

Eleonora Vratskidou is visiting professor of art history at the Department of Modern Art History, Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies, Technische Universität Berlin. She graduated with a B.A. in History and Archaeology from Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History and Civilizations from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (E.H.E.S.S.), Paris. She has been a visiting researcher at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin (2012); a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2012-2013) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin (2014-2017). She has previously taught at the EHESS (2011-2012), the François-Rabelais University of Tours (2014) and the School of Fine Arts in Athens (2015). She is a specialist of modern Greek art and cultural history, while her current research revolves around the history of art history and archeology in the 19th century, in a transnational European perspective.

e.vratskidou@tu-berlin.de

T + 49 30 314 2964

Elisabeth Furtwängler studied history of art, modern history, and archeology in Berlin and Rome. After graduation, she worked in the antiquities trade in Switzerland. From 2008-2010, she was assistant researcher at the University of Leipzig. In 2015, she received her PhD with a thesis on printmaking in Paris in the post-war period. Currently, she works at the research area “Art Market and Provenance” of the Department for Modern Art History at the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies at TU Berlin where she is responsible for the Franco-German project “Repository of the players on the art market in France during the German Occupation, 1940-1944.” The project is a cooperation with the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and is supported by Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (DZK).

e.furtwaengler@tu-berlin.de

Isabelle Dolezalek is an art historian whose research focuses on the middle ages and museum history, with a particular concentration on processes of exchange between Islamic and Christian cultures. Isabelle studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Warbug Institute in London. In 2008, after completing two stays in Damascus and a master’s degree in Lyon, she began working in a junior research group on ornamentation in Persian-Arabic and European visual arts of the middle ages at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2012 to 2016, she was involved in the project “Objects in Transfer” within the SFB 980 “Episteme in Bewegung.” Here, she worked on the development of a transcultural exhibition, which has been on view at the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin since April 2016 (http://www.objects-in-transfer.sfb-episteme.de). In April 2016, Isabelle Dolezalek began working as a research assistant at Bénédicte Savoy’s Chair for Modern Art History at Technischen Universität Berlin. ​

dolezalek@tu-berlin.de

Mareike Vennen is a cultural scientist at the Institute for Art History and Historical Urban Studies at Technische Universität Berlin. She is currently conducting research on the popular history of natural objects and the museum as part of the BMBF-funded research project "Dinosaurs in Berlin." She studied cultural and theater studies, as well as French philology, in Berlin and Paris, and received her doctorate in 2016 from Bauhaus-University Weimar on the early history of the aquarium in the 19th century. Her research interests include the history of natural history in science and the media, collection and museum history, and cultural-animal studies.

mareike.vennen@tu-berlin.de

T + 49 30 314 28922

Mingyuan Hu read classics, philosophy, art history and literature at the University of Glasgow, where she received her doctorate. Before joining TU Berlin in 2018, she taught art history at the universities of Glasgow (2008-2012) and Leeds (2015-2017). In 2013-2014 she was visiting scholar at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her research concerns 20th-century art and intellectual histories in China and Europe, comparative historiography and methodology of art history, and Chinese calligraphy. Presently she investigates China’s recent past as a history of emotions; and entwined spaces, physical and psychological, in the absence of things and of memories.

Mattes Lammert studied philosophy and history of art in Paris, Bologna and Berlin. After a research fellowship at the German Center for Art History in Paris, he has been a research assistant at the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies at the Technical University of Berlin since 2018, where he is responsible for the research project "Acquisitions made by the Berlin State Museums on the Parisian Art Market during the Occupation 1940-1944". This project, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, is realized in collaboration with the State Museums in Berlin and the German Center for Art History in Paris and reconstructs systematically and comprehensively the acquisition policy of the Berlin State Museums on the Parisian art market during the German occupation. Based on these acquisitions, which consist primarily of objects from antiquity, the project also aims to contribute to research on the international antiquities market and the historical role of Paris as a trading hub.

mattes.lammert@tu-berlin.de​​​​​​​

Matilde Cartolari studied art history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Between 2014 and 2017 she participated to the creation of the app “La vita delle opere” (“The life of artworks”), devoted to the conservation history of some paintings of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. From 2015, after an Erasmus+ internship at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, she attended seminars at the Fondazione Zeri in Bologna, the École du Louvre and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.

Since October 2016 she is a PhD student at the Technische Universität Berlin in co-tutelle with the University of Udine (tutors Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy and Donata Levi) with a project on the exhibitions of the Italian Old masters promoted by the Fascist regime in the 1930s, founded by Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. In the winter term 2019 she was occasional student at the Warburg Institute in London with a scholarship from the DAAD. Her research focus on restoration history, photography and museology in Northern Italy between 1930 and 1950.