Happening

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Previous talks:

In September 2025, I participated in the fourth conference of the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology (EAAA) in Lisbon. Together with Prof. Dr. De-nin Lee (Emerson College), I have co-organized a double-panel on the theme “Asian Art in Planetary Perspective.” My own paper is titled “Moon Rocks in China: Energy, Provenance, and Planetary Heritage“. My trip was made possible by the generous support of the DAAD.

Funded by the British Academy’s Knowledge Frontiers Seed Grant, I had the great pleasure to work with Emily McGiffin (Warwick), T Pritchard (Edinburgh), Antonio Montañes Jimenez (Oxford), and side by side with Hannah Baader and Antje Paul to organize the interdisciplinary workshop “Art and Conflict in Times of Climate Change.” With the generous support of the 4A_Lab (KHI Florenz MPI / SPK) and Forum Transregionale Studien (TRAFO) we have held the workshop in Berlin-Grunewald from 17 to 18 July 2025. Participants in all roles – whom we call Critical Friends – contributed fascinating talks and discussions across the fields of art and cultural history, anthropology, archaeology, history of science and technology, literary and media studies, and geophysical studies. Please find the full program PDF here and more information on the relevant KHI webpage.

On 26 March 2025, I had the pleasure to present part of my book manuscript content at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich. The workshop concluded my term as the Albert-Ottenbacher-Fellow for Provenance Research at the ZI.

In February 2025, I participated in the KuK Tuesday event “Dislocation and Crowns” at the Department of Modern Art History, TU Berlin. My contribution was titled “The Transculturality of Provenance Research.” The discussion and questions, as is always the case with KuK Tuesday events, have been very inspiring to my own work. A recording of the event is available on KuK Tuesday’s YouTube page.

At the end of November 2024, I had the honor to present a paper to the Ulm Association for Art and Cultural Studies at the online workshop series “Ecologies of Premodern Art.” My paper was titled “Elemental Indigenous: A Planetary Approach to Porcelain in Early Modern China.”

From November 4 to 8, 2024, the 4A_Lab organized a five-day Academy on the topic “Ecological Entanglements across Collections – Plant Lives and Beyond.” The 4A_Lab Academy advanced the collaboration between the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. We moved through many museum collections and exhibitions, and participated in heated discussions after panels and lectures. As part of my second book project, my presentation was titled “The Depth of Surface: Ecologies of Lacquer from Late Imperial China to Contemporary Berlin.”

Working on the concept of Ecocritical Museology, I presented a paper titled “Energy Consumption, Ecological Art History, and Environmental Humanities: From Methodological Reflections to Curatorial Intervention” in the panel “Pushing the Boundaries of Energy History” at the 4th World Congress of Environmental History (WCEH) at the University of Oulu in north Finland in August 2024. My online participation at the WCEH was supported by a DAAD grant.

In late June 2024, my research took me to Lyon, France, for the 36th world congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), where I presented a working paper in the session “Materials in the Making: Towards a Production Turn.”

In early June 2024, I was invited to participate in the UK-German Frontiers of Humanities Symposium 2024 “Natures, Cultures, and Communities” co-organized by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the British Academy, and hosted by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

On 6 May 2024, I presented part of my first book manuscript at the workshop Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia, hosted by the Department of Art History, University of Chicago.

3–5 April 2024, I convened a session on ecocritical art history for the 50th annual conference of the Association for Art History (AAH). The session was titled “Energy Consumption in Art History: State of the Interdisciplinary Field,” and consisted of four presentations. My on-site participation was made possible by a DAAD travel grant.

On 1 February 2024, I gave a short talk titled “Energy, Climate, and Ecocritical Art History in a Kiln Waste” at “Looking Beyond, Looking Ahead: Future Directions for Transcultural Art History,” a symposium in honour of Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja on the occasion of her retirement from the Professorship of Global Art History, Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg.

In January 2024, I presented a working paper, titled “From ’18 Stuck grose Vasen’ to ‘national wertvolles Kulturgut’: Chinese Monumental Vases and the History of Chinese Art History at the Dresden Porcelain Collection,” in the workshop “From Cabinets to Museums: Exploring the Histories of Chinese Collections in Europe.” The workshop was organized by Dr. Emily Teo at Gotha Research Centre, University of Erfurt. Please see this poster (PDF) for the full program of the workshop.

On 5 December 2023, I presented a working paper at the second workshop of AHRC research network “Making Museum Professionals, 1850-Present.” My paper was titled “Through Medicine, Photography, and Archaeology: Chen Wanli (1892–1969) and the Making of a Museum Professional in Twentieth-Century China.” For the full program of the online workshop, please see the webpage here.

On 13 April 2023, I presented an overview of my dissertation at the Emerging Scholars Showcase organized by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA).

On 21 January 2023, I presented a working paper titled “The Porcelain-Regiment of Prussia: Chinese Porcelain and Military Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century German Lands” at the twelfth annual conference on military material culture “Material Matters: It’s in the Details” organised by Center for Digital History, Fort Ticonderoga, New York.

On 26 September 2022, I delivered a full lecture titled “Provenancing the Dragoon Vases: Porcelain, Architecture, and Monumentality in German Antiquarianism (1700–1933)” at the Wallace Collection’s Seminars in the History of Collecting. Based on part of my dissertation research, a video recording of the talk will soon be available on the Wallace Collection’s YouTube channel.

In August 2022, I presented a working paper titled “Chen Wanli and Ceramic Archaeology in Twentieth-Century China” at the conference “History and Practice of Archaeology in the Chinese Cultural Sphere,” held at the University of Oxford, August 22–24, 2022.

12 April 2022, Séminaire Collection Lecture Series, “The Archaeology of Provenance in Eighteenth-Century Jingdezhen, Beijing, Paris, and Dresden: A French Jesuit in China and His Large ‘Urns’.” Please click here to view the 2022 annual program of the Séminaire Collection.

26 October 2021, online panel series organized by the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology (EAAA). Please click here to view the program and book of abstracts.