Teaching

Over the past six years, I have continuously taught multiple seminars per academic year alongside lecture formats, ring lectures, and research-oriented courses in art history and visual culture, primarily within the cultural studies programs at Leuphana University Lüneburg. I have also taught in the Master’s program Collection-Based Knowledge and Cultural History at the University of Erfurt. I understand teaching as a critical practice that equips students to analyze objects, images, practices, and institutions as historically situated formations shaped by political and economic forces. My aim is to connect rigorous historical analysis with pressing contemporary questions, fostering methodological competence, intellectual independence, and reflexive awareness.

Thematic Focus: Genealogies of Art, Media, and Society

My courses investigate the historical genealogies of concepts that structure art’s relationship to society and knowledge and focusses on problem-centered trajectories that cut across epochs. Seminars range from early modern image theories to modern aesthetic theory, the historical avant-gardes, and contemporary practices of institutional critique. Recurrent thematic clusters include the interrelation of art and technology (from photography to AI), ecocriticism and material flows, as well as gender, identity, and decolonial perspectives. This diachronic approach allows students to understand contemporary debates as historically layered formations, while maintaining a firm grounding in art-historical method and theory.

Methodology: Critical Dialogue and Situated Analysis

My teaching is conceived as a form of situated inquiry that consistently bridges theory and practice. Seminars function as interactive laboratories in which close reading, object-based analysis, and critical discussion are combined with collaborative formats and peer teaching. A core principle of my pedagogy is the systematic integration of institutional contexts: whenever possible, courses extend beyond the classroom to include on-site engagement with museums, archives, collections, and exhibition spaces. Teaching has included work with the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Bode Museum, the Humboldt Forum, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Forum Kunst am Bundestag, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; the Lenbachhaus in Munich; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (MdBK); the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum and the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden; the Museum am Rothenbaum and the Kunsthalle Hamburg; as well as Benary-Speicher and Kunsthalle in Erfurt. In addition, my courses have incorporated research-based excursions to Bauhaus sites in Dessau, the E-Werk Luckenwalde and to the Margaretha Reichardt House near Erfurt. These experiences are complemented by structured conversations with artists, curators, and archivists, providing students with firsthand insights into the professional fields of art and cultural production, collection-based research, provenance studies, archival practice, education and mediation, art critic and curatorial work.

Margaretha-Reichardt-Haus
Margaretha-Reichardt-Haus
Leonhardi-Museum Dresden, Ausstellung zu Roger Melis, mit Mathias Bertram
Mauermahnmal / Forum Kunst Bundestag, mit Kristina Volke und Harald Hauswald
Bauhaus-Museum Dessau
Archiv Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Dessau Törten
Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Ausstellung Ayoung Kim. Many Worlds Over
Druckereimuseum und Schaudepot im Benary-Speicher
Humboldt-Forum Berlin
Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Führung durch die Ausstellung zu Gerhard Richter
E-Werk Luckenwalde, Projekt Human Machine, mit Helen Turner
Museum der Bildenden Kunst Leipzig, Ausstellung zu Evelyn Richter, mit Aurelia Rager und Jeannette Stoschek
Lenbachhaus München, Projektarbeit zur Ausstellung Gruppendynamik – Der Blaue Reiter

Learning Objectives: Analytical Depth, Research Competence, and Institutional Literacy

The primary goal of my teaching is to develop students’ analytical, interpretative, and research-based competencies across different levels of study and disciplinary contexts. Instruction consistently proceeds from the concrete artifact — the artwork, object, photograph, textile, or archival document — toward broader theoretical, historical, and socio-economic questions. This object-based approach enables students to understand cultural phenomena as historically situated, materially grounded, and institutionally mediated. Through research-oriented assignments, students learn how to formulate research questions, construct coherent arguments, and substantiate claims through close analysis of visual, material, and textual sources. In this way, my teaching trains students not only to interpret art and visual culture historically, but to mobilize art-historical knowledge as a critical tool for analyzing contemporary cultural, institutional, and political conditions — in academic research as well as in museum, educational, and curatorial contexts.