Curriculum

Vera-Simone Schulz is an art historian working at the crossroads of African, Islamic and European art histories and critical museology. She holds the professorship for transcultural art history (W1) at Leuphana University Lüneburg and is an associate researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. 

 
Vera-Simone Schulz studied art history, philosophy and Russian literature in Berlin, Moscow, and Damascus. Her PhD thesis on Florence and Tuscany in their Mediterranean and global entanglements already went beyond the common geographical framework of art historical analyses concerned with Italy and the Islamic world by also discussing material from West, Central and Eastern Africa in this context. It is forthcoming in the form of two monographs “Infiltrating Artifacts: Florence and Tuscany in their Mediterranean and Global Entanglements” and “Florence and Tuscany in a Global Perspective: Complexifying Notions of Connectivity and Resistance”. Her habilitation project and book-in-progress “East Africa’s Elsewheres: Archipelagic Thinking and Transcultural Art Histories” moves from Florence as one of the traditional centers of art history to the East African coast, questioning canons and canonization processes and contributing to the overcoming of traditional notions of periphery and center in the discipline of art history. 

 
Vera-Simone Schulz is PI of the international research project “Material Migrations: Mamluk Metalwork across Afro-Eurasia”, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (together with Gertrude Aba Mansah Eyifa-Dzidzienyo) with four doctoral and postdoctoral fellows based in Ghana, Nigeria, and Ethiopia and co-convener of the online lecture series “Material Migrations”.  
She is PI of the international research project “Epistemologies of Conviviality: Temporalities and Aesthetics of the Built Environment across the Horn of Africa and Beyond” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (together with Elyas Abdulahi and Akram Elkhalifa) that includes the organization of summer schools in Somalia (online), Eritrea and Ethiopia (in person), the hybrid workshop series “Decentering Italian Colonial Heritage in Africa” and the online lecture series “Ecologies, Collections, and Contested Heritage: The (Un-)Natural History of Italian Colonialism in Africa” (together with Jermay Michael Gabriel).  

 
In 2022, she was co-PI of the international research project “The Ecology of Ceramics in Coastal Architectural Heritage” in collaboration with Soumyen Bandyopadhyay, funded by the HSS Faculty Research Development Fund of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Liverpool. Her research has been supported by fellowships of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (KHI), the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) Vienna, the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and by a residency at the Warburg Institute in London, among others. She was a fellow of the MuseumsLab program, funded by the German Minister of State for Culture and the Media (BKM) and the Federal Foreign Office (AA) on the future of museums in Africa and Europe and is a MuseumsLab Alumna. 

In 2022, she was CIRN Intesa Sanpaolo Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow at Wolfson College, and organized the international symposium “Between the Black Mediterranean and the Black Atlantic: Complexifying Stories of Connectivity and Resistance” at CRASSH and Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge in May 2022. 

Vera-Simone Schulz is academic coordinator of Black Archive Alliance at the Recovery Plan (in collaboration with Justin Randolph Thompson), co-convener of “Plants in Africa and Planetary Entanglements: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)” at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (together with Jacques Aymeric and Abidemi Babatunde Babalola) and co-founder and co-convener of “Planetary Patchwork: A Perpetual Seminar on Artistic Practices, Heritage, and Epistemologies” (together with Evi Olde Rikkert and Nicole Remus).