The Institute of Art History is delighted to announce the appointment of Katrin Nahidi, M.A. as a new University Assistant for Modern and Contemporary Art from October 2022. She studied Art History, History and Culture of the Middle East and Modern German Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In 2021, Katrin Nahidi received her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin with the thesis Modernism Revisited - Exhibitions, Cultural Politics, and Modernist Art Production in Iran. Her dissertation was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the Sinergia project Other Modernities - Practices and Patrimony of Visual Expression Outside the West at the University of Bern and Freie Universität Berlin (2013-2017).
In 2023, her monograph entitled The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran: Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production will be published by Cambridge University Press. This publication will show that modern Iranian art represents a diverse field of cultural production that critically reflects questions of Iranian modernity and modernization. Postcolonial theory as a methodological key helps to deconstruct imperial concepts of modernity in order to decolonize Iranian art history.
Katrin Nahidi's research interests lie in global art, historiography of modern art, non-Western modern and contemporary art production, art theory from the global South and postcolonial art history.