Tanja Michalsky - Biography#

Tanja Michalsky studied art history, philosophy and German studies in Trier and Munich. In 1995 she earned her doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with the thesis "Memoria und Representation. The tombs of the royal house Anjou in Italy ", in which she analyzed the political functions of the tombs and the images of a sacred dynasty. In the time as a assistant prof. at the Art History Institute of the J.W. Goethe University in Franfurt a.M., she devoted herself increasingly to the space-generating potential of images and maps as well as to the social space in film. In her habilitation thesis "Projection and Imagination. The Dutch Landscape of the Early Modern Period in the Discourse of Geography and Painting ", which was funded (2001-2004) with a Lise Meitner scholarship at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, she examined the specific epistems of cartography and the media differentiation national rooms. From 2007 to 2015 she was a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin. From 2012-14 she led the DFG Research Training Group "The Knowledge of the Arts". Since October 2014 she is director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and is increasingly dedicated to the art history of southern Italy, especially Naples, the conceptions of the 'long Middle Ages' and its reception, as well as the construction of historical spaces in text, image and Map.