Karin Gludovatz, professor of art history at Freie Universität Berlin, specializes in the art and visual/material cultures of the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe, particularly the historic Netherlands (now Belgium and the Netherlands) and England.
She is interested in image theory; the material culture of royal courts; the intertwining of art and colonial politics; the materiality, mediality, and topology of the illuminated codex; and forms, functions, and theories of the marginal.
In her current book project, Karin Gludovatz examines topological structures in fifteenth-century Netherlandish panel painting, asking whether its orientation on the surface can be understood as a specific order of visibility that designs an alternative view of extra-pictorial reality and thus also represents an alternative mode of experiencing “world” and generating knowledge about that world. Another project uses the example of the seventeenth-century Dutch colonization of Brazil to address the procedures of generating and disseminating knowledge under colonial conditions through artistic production, natural history, and artifacts.
Karin Gludovatz studied at the University of Vienna and the University of Hamburg and earned her doctorate in Vienna in 2004 with a dissertation on the poetics of artists’ signatures. After working at the University of Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Berlin University of the Arts, Freie Universität Berlin, and, as guest professor, the University of Hamburg, she was appointed professor at Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. She was also dean of the Department of History and Cultural Studies from 2013 to 2017.
Please find out more about Karin Gludovatz on the FU Website.