Dr. Katharine Stahlbuhk

Katharine Stahlbuhk is an art historian and specialist for 14th and 15th-century Italian art. She is also a trained conservator for wall paintings. Her research explores the materiality and technical execution of artworks, as well as the ethical implications of humanist aesthetics. She is particularly interested in the intersections of visual art and literature, with a focus on the mendicant orders and their contribution to humanism. More recently, her studies have turned to the reception of early modern concepts and images of the human in the 20^th century, and to how these were reshaped by political, cultural, and ideological ruptures.

After completing her training in conservation, she studied Scienze per i beni Culturali and Storia dell'Arte at the Università degli Studi di Siena, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia di Arezzo, and earned her PhD from Universität Hamburg in 2018.

Between 2014 and 2018 she was first a doctoral student and research assistant in the department of Alessandro Nova and subsequently research assistant to Hana Gründler at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. Since then, she has been associated researcher in the Research Group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual at the KHI–MPI, actively contributing in projects on Leon Battista Alberti (including the first German translation and critical edition of his Profugiorum ab aerumna: Über die Seelenruhe, Wagenbach 2022, 2nd edition 2023; lecture series and online-exhibition), on colour semantics (Phenomenon ‘Colour’: Aesthetics – Epistemology – Politics, thematic issue of the kritische berichte (2022) and lecture series) and currently in the project Humanism between Ideal and Ideology.

From 2019 to the end of 2021, she was research assistant to Tristan Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, followed by a Rush H Kress Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2022–2023). She was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow within the PRIN project Books in Motion at the Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell'Antichità (DiSSGeA) of the Università degli Studi di Padova (2023–2024), and Senior Staff Associate at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University in the City of New York (spring term 2025).

Beginning in 2026, she will be postdoctoral researcher in the SUPSI-based project A Minor Model? Structures, Iconographies and Materials for the Milanese Franciscan Observance between Invention, Disruption and Anachronisms (1420–1550), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). 

She is currently working on a major project on convent libraries (primarily of the Dominicans) and on the reception of humanism during the 20^th century. In connection to the latter, she and Hana Gründler are editing the proceedings of the transdisciplinary workshop Humanism between Ideal and Ideology. Images and Concepts of the Human after 1945 held in November 2024, which will appear as a special issue of the Zeitsprünge in 2026.