Main Focus
- Art history of Naples and southern Italy
- Memorial Culture
- Episteme of visual media (especially cartography)
- Historical spaces and their representation
Curriculum Vitae
Tanja Michalsky studied art history, philosophy and German philology. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 1995 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich with her thesis published as Memoria und Repräsentation. Die Grabmäler des Königshauses Anjou in Italien. The work investigates the connection between political and social memoria within the iconography of the Anjou dynasty as a beata stirps. Her habilitation thesis Projektion und Imagination. Die niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Diskurs von Geographie und Malerei was supported by a Lise Meitner scholarship at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf from 2001-2004. In it Michalsky examined the specific epistemes of cartography and visual art as well as the medial differentiation of national spaces. From 2007 to 2015 she was professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and from 2012 to 2014 she was head of the DFG Research Training Group "Das Wissen der Künste".
In her research department "Cities and Spaces in Premodernity", she focuses on the understanding of historical spaces through a critical reflection on media. Texts, images, maps and films – as well as the interplay between these media – are analyzed from an epistemological perspective as producers of space. The department’s focus on southern Italy, especially Naples, covers the historical spectrum from the pre-modern to the present, the present being especially well represented for discussions of urbanism and film.
Memberships/Honorary positions
- Max Weber Foundation
- Center for the Art and the Architectural History of Port Cities at La Capraia
- Käte Hamburger Kolleg für kulturelle Praktiken der Reparation (CURE)