Kerstin Schwedes

Dr. phil, studied art history, history, and German literature. After studying abroad in Italy, she completied her MA in 1993 and was awarded her PhD from the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1996. From 1997 to 2002, she was a fellow of the Dorothea Erxleben Programme in Rome and Göttingen, and continued to work in Göttingen in 2003 and 2004 as an assistant at the history of art department. From 2004 to 2009, Dr. Schwedes was a postdoctoral researcher at the German Research Foundation in the Emmy Noether Research Group, where she worked on ‘The Reception of Romanticism, the Aesthetics of Autonomy, and Art History’ at the history of art department in Göttingen. 

Dr. Schwedes has been the coordinator of the project 'EurViews. Europe in Textbooks' since July 2009. This multilingual internet publication uses commentated sources from textbooks to show how concepts of Europe and Europeanness have been conveyed by history and geography textbooks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With its systematic and historical approach, this project aims to raise awareness of the plurality and changeability of ideas about Europe, and of the variations and competition between memory cultures during the twentieth century. Dr. Schwedes is currently working on the project ‚ 'European Icons. Bilder Europas in europäischen Schulbüchern des 20. Jahrhunderts' (Head: Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig). The project analyses and contextualises visions of Europe in 20th century European textbooks. A database is currently being developed that will present nation-conform images of Europe and will allow synchronic as well as diachronic comparisons to help the historical canonisation processes of images of Europe to emerge. The media history research approach also means that the use of images in textbooks is an aspect of general significance. The evaluated material can be used for transfer projects relating to history teaching.

Her research and teaching foci include aspects of inter- and transmedia, art history methods and forms of knowledge transfer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as educational and documentary film.

Selected Publications

• „Polychromie als Herausforderung. Ästhetische Debatten zur Farbigkeit von Skulptur“. In: Heß, Gilbert; Agazzi, Elena; Décultot, Elisabeth (eds):  Klassizistisch-romantische Kunst(t)räume. Imaginationen im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts und ihr Beitrag zur kulturellen Identitätsfindung. Vol. 1: European Philhellenism / Der europäische Philhellenismus. Berlin, New York 2009, 61-84
• Thédon retrouvé, in: Kunstchronik, 2009: 5, 197-200
• Wortlose Beredsamkeit. Evokatorische Bildsprache von Michelangelos Römischer Pietà und dem Minerva-Christus, in: Laufhütte, Hartmut (ed): Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz 2000:1, 355-372
• Historia in statua. Zur Eloquenz plastischer Bildwerke Michelangelos im Umfeld des Christus von Santa Maria sopra Minerva zu Rom, Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Lang 1998.

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