Europäisches
Kolleg
Jena

Joachim Baur

Joachim Baur is a historian, curator and museum consultant, based in Berlin (www.die-exponauten.com). Currently he is curating Forum Wissen, a new science museum at Goettingen University (2019), and the permanent exhibition of Museum Friedland at the historic site of the oldest refugee camp in Germany (2016, extension 2020). Other recent projects include an exhibition on Capital by Karl Marx (2017), 19th century globalization (2014) and an open-air exhibition on urban diversity in Berlin (2012). In addition to curating, he teaches courses in museum studies at New York University Berlin and HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin and lectures on contemporary museum-related issues. Baur holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (University of Tuebingen, 2009) and an M.A. in Modern European History (University of Stuttgart, 2001) and Museum Studies (New York University, 2004). His publications revolve around the history and theory of museums, migration history, representations of multiculturalism and the trans-/nationalization of memory.

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Prof. Karen van den Berg

Karen van den Berg (born 1963) is professor for Art Theory and Curating at Zeppelin University (ZU). She studied Art History, Classical Archeology and Nordic Philology in Saarbrücken and Basel. Her PhD thesis on Matthias Grünewald has been supervised by Gottfried Boehm and received support through a stipend of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung. Van den Berg also earned the ›Max Imdahl-Stipendium für Kunstvermittlung‹ between 1994 and 1996 and between 1993 and 2003 she has been a regular lecturer and research fellow at the chair for Art Science at University Witten/Herdecke. Research stays and teaching brought her to numerous internationally acclaimed institutions including the Chinati Foundation in Marfa (Texas), Bauhaus University Weimar and Parsons New School for Design in New York City. She also served as visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and as a fellow at IKKM (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie) in Weimar. Her research focusses on the theory and history of displaying; museums; educational architecture; art and politics; artistic episteme; art market studies and studio practice.

Prof. Michael Diers

Michael Diers, art historian and critic, is Professor for Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and Extraordinary Professor for Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on Renaissance Art, modernism and contemporary art, photography and new media, art und media theory, political iconography and history of science. He is co-editor of the Collected Writings of Aby Warburg and was the longstanding editor of the paperback series “kunststück“ and „Fundus“. In addition, he works as a freelance writer for the German newspapers „Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and „Süddeutsche Zeitung”.

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Guillaume de Fonclare

Guillaume de Fonclare, born in 1968, is a French writer. He obtained a Master degree of Medieval History at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France in 1993 and in 1994 a Master degree of Management at the Business School of Marseille, France. In the last 20 years he has led public or para-public organizations in the Social and Health sector. From 2006 to 2010, he ran the “L’Historial de la Grande Guerre" museum in Péronne, France, a museum devoted to the First World War, which is considered to be the European reference point for this period. He had to stop his professional activity in 2010 due to health reasons and began a career as a writer. Since then de Fonclare has published three books, the first one of which - "Inside my own skin" – is translated into English and into Rumanian. The fourth one is awaited in Spring 2017.

Prof. Barbara Holzer

Barbara Holzer is an architect, exhibition designer, and professor for design at Peter Behrens School of Arts at University of Applied Sciences in Dusseldorf. After graduation, she worked for several years as a freelance architect based in Berlin, where among her collaborations were multiple projects with Studio Daniel Libeskind. In 2004, she founded with Tristan Kobler their studio Holzer Kobler Architekturen in Zurich; in 2012, a further office in Berlin was set up. Currently, besides urban design and architecture projects, the two studios implement diverse permanent and temporary exhibitions; many of them merge approaches and themes from contemporary history, society, and art. In Barbara Holzer’s work memorial design and commemorative culture in architecture and scenography are core themes. Her expertise in this field makes her a frequent panel speaker, interview partner, and contributor to different publication formats. In addition, she is a member of various expert committees; she has recently presided the jury in the competition for the Munich Olympics Memorial, which was inaugurated in 2017. Among Barbara Holzer’s current projects are the permanent exhibition of Buchenwald Memorial, opened in 2016, and the scenography of the new Bauhaus Museum Weimar, where the opening is scheduled for 2019.

Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She was honoured for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. She was recently decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the President of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin and Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, among others.

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Prof. Stefan Krankenhagen

Stefan Krankenhagen, born in 1969, is Professor for Cultural Studies and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim. Currently, his research focuses on theories of materiality, especially within Popular Culture. Moreover, he has done extensive research on processes of Europeanization in the museal field, taking up topics as Contemporary Collecting, the Mapping of objects, Digitalisation, and Participatory Strategies from a European and transnational perspective. While he has also published about sports- and fan culture, his first academic work was about aesthetic strategies of representing the Holocaust. For his dissertation "Auschwitz darstellen. Ästhetische Positionen zwischen Adorno, Spielberg und Walser" he was awarded a grant to study the United States Holocaust Museum and its museal strategy of authenticity.

Cilly Kugelmann

Until March 2017, Cilly Kugelmann held the position of the Programme Director at the Jewish Museum Berlin. She is currently the Chief Curator of the new Core Exhibition. From 1986 until 2000, she supervised the education program and PR of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main and worked as an exhibition curator.

Prof. Thomas Sandkühler

Thomas Sandkühler is a Professor for History Didactics at the Humboldt University Berlin. He received his PhD from the Bielefeld University with a dissertation about the Holocaust in Eastern Poland and served i. a. as an Assistant Professor at the Bielefeld history department. From 1997 to 1999 he directed the German research team of the Independent Commission of Experts: Switzerland – Second World War. Sandkühler had been teaching the subjects history and German literature at Secondary and High Schools before he was appointed Professor in 2009 by his current University. His fields of research comprise Nazi Germany and its representation in Public History, the history of History Didactics and the history pedagogy of Memorials. In September 2015 he was elected First Chairman of the Konferenz für Geschichtsdidaktik e. V., the Association of History Didactics in Germany.

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Prof. Thomas Thiemeyer

Thomas Thiemeyer is Professor of Museum Studies at the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft at the University of Tübingen. From 2003 to 2006, he worked as a curator at HG Merz, where he aided in developing the concepts for the Mercedes-Benz Museum (2006) and the Porsche-Museum (2009). From 2006 to 2009, he completed his PhD under Gottfried Korff on the topic of the presentation of WWI and WWII in museums. From 2009 to 2012 he coordinated the museum studies research project wissen&museum, a cooperation between the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the Ludwig-Uhland-Institute, the Kunsthistorisches Institut, and the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien. His research and teaching focus on museum and archival research, memorial culture, and cultural theory. He is currently supervising three projects, one on scenography in exhibitions, one on how German museums deal with collections from the colonial era, and one on the remembrance of the Shoah in an immigration society.

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Dr. Paul Williams

Dr. Paul Williams specializes in the representation of political histories in museums. Since 2008 he has worked for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the New York-based museum planning and design firm being chiefly involved with projects associated with communicating modern histories. Prior to that, Paul Williams spent several years teaching in the Museum Studies graduate program at New York University.

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