Davide Ferri, M.A.

Davide Ferri currently holds the position of Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, working as scientific assistant to the Director and collaborating in various research projects within the Department Wolf. He is a PhD candidate in the Chair of Early Modern Art History at the University of Bern and member in the doctoral program in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg.

Davide has a strong international background, working across different methodologies and bridging art history with visual and cultural studies. His current research focuses on the relations between images and territories within political discourses from ca. 1600 to 1850. In his dissertation, he investigates the political, devotional, and ecological agency of landscape in the Republic of Genoa (Liguria, Corsica, North-Tunisia).

He earned his B.A. in Art History with a minor in Archaeology and his M.A. in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-University, Berlin, as a long-term DAAD fellow and under the supervision of Prof. H. Bredekamp and Prof. G. Wolf. He was a SEMP-funded visiting student at the University of Basel. Before joining the KHI, Davide worked as assistant to the General Director of the Humboldt Forum Foundation, as research assistant in various projects (e.g., the «Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance» and «Transdisciplinary Indexing of Cultural-Historical Collections», a cooperation project with the Berlin State Museums), and as a researcher for Berlin-based galleries with a focus on East Asian art.

Davide co-authored the German commentary of J. J. Winckelmann’s Roman Writings (2020). His further publications—on topics spanning from seventeenth-century visual culture to contemporary art—have appeared (or will soon appear) as catalogue essays as well as articles and reviews in leading journals. Since 2020, he is member in the editorial board of ArtHist.net, the worldwide largest information network for art historians. In 2021, he co-organized the international conference Against Identity? Discourses of Art History and Visual Culture in Italy.