Doctoral Candidate (GRK-2840) Anita Markmiller

Early modern art history
Art of the 20th/21st century 
Visual epistemology 
Maritime Spaces 
New materialism
Questions regarding the Seen and Unseen
Art in the context of things that are seemingly beyond comprehension

In her doctoral project, Anita Markmiller examines the relationship between humans, the Sea, and the Divine in the sixteenth century from an art historical perspective. The human relationship with the Sea has long been described as uncertain and ambivalent, and sixteenth-century maritime exploration sharpened this tension by expanding the limits of the known world. Constructed as a space of knowledge, a controllable political and economic realm, and a domain of uncontrollable material forces, the many perspectives of the Sea brought forth not one image but many, at times contradictory ones. Positioned between art history, the history of knowledge, the blue humanities, and religious studies, this dissertation asks how art gave the Sea visual form against a backdrop of ambivalence, uncertainty, and different registers of knowledge about it, and how art shaped early modern understandings of maritime spaces. It reads images not as straightforward depictions of the Sea but as sites where human agency, divine order, and natural forces were negotiated.

2023– Doctoral candidate in the research training group "Ambivalent Enmity", HCTS, University of Heidelberg
2023 MA Art History and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Topic: “Die Venus, der Müll und das Meer. Eine kunsthistorische Perspektive auf die Beziehung zwischen Mensch, Müll und Natur in Annarita Serras La Venere (2012)”
2022-2023 Student Assistant for Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja
2022-2023 Teaching Assignment for "Methods of Art History"
2021-2023 Student Assistant for PD Dr. Ulrich Blanché
2021 Internship at Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz (Department Gerhard Wolf)
2019 BA Art History, Film Studies, Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena 
2019 Internship at Kulturamt Kempten, Project Management
2018-2019 Art Mediator at Städtische Museen Jena