Opening lecture by Prof. Dr. Julia Voss

Julia Voss is an art historian, historian of science and research associate in the presidium of the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin. Her doctoral thesis on “Darwin’s Pictures. Views of evolutionary theory, 1837-1874” (Yale University Press 2010) was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society. From 2007 to 2017 she headed the art department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and was also deputy head of the cultural section. She has published widely on the reception of evolutionary theory in art and literature, including an analysis of Michael Ende’s works in “Darwin's Jim Knopf” (S. Fischer Verlag 2009) and received the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose from the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Since 2015 she has been teaching as an honorary professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Studies at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. In 2021 she co-curated the exhibition “documenta. Politics and Art” at the DHM. In 2020, her artist biography “Hilma af Klint” (S. Fischer Verlag, englisch: Chicago University Press) was published, which was on the shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and became a SPIEGEL bestseller. She is currently co-curating the exhibition “Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future,” which will open on March 15th at the Kunstsammlung NRW.