Stefanie Lenk is serving as Acting Professor of Medieval Art History at the Department of Art History in Göttingen during the winter semester of 2026/27. She has been a research associate at this chair since 2021.
She studied in Berlin, Florence and London and was a doctoral researcher in the British Museum and University of Oxford’s Empires of Faith research project research project until 2018. She received her doctorate in art history from Oxford in 2019. Her book Roman Identity and Lived Religion. Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
From 2016 to 2018, she worked as a curator at the British Museum, in which capacity she curated Imagining the Divine. Art and the Rise of World Religions at the Ashmolean Museum. From 2018, she taught as a research and teaching assistant at the Chair of Pre-Modern Art History at the University of Bern. There, she coordinated the ERC project Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art, led by Beate Fricke, until 2020. From 2020 to 2021, she was a fellow at RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies at the University of Hamburg.
Stefanie Lenk’s current research project, Trusting Images. How to Create Orthodox Imagery Amidst Heresy – Lucas of Tuy’s De Altera Vita (c. 1235–36), examines how understandings of images changed in response to perceived heresies in the thirteenth century. From November 2025 to April 2026, she was a Research Associate at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and she has received funding from the Daimler and Benz Foundation since 2025. Stefanie Lenk is a member of the Young Academy of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz.
Religious art and architecture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula, in Italy, North Africa, and from a global perspective
Image and heresy in the 12th and 13th centuries in Southern and Central Europe
Reuse and the reception of antiquity
Sculpture and applied arts
University collections of the 19th and 20th centuries
Methods of collaborative and cross-cultural research
2026 International Conference “Image and Heresy in the Medieval West and the Islamic World,” eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, Basel, together with Martin Schwarz, 29–31 May 2026
2026 Section “Making and Moving between ‘Worlds’: Craftspeople in the Late Medieval Crowns of Aragon and Castile,” 9th International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, “Small Worlds, Big Worlds: Medieval Mediterranean Perspectives,” Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Universidade Nova, Lisbon, 22–26 June 2026
2026 Section “Ordering and Remembering” at the conference “Engaged Art History,” Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, 15–16 January 2026
2025 International Conference “First Images / Inventing Images,” Institute of Art History, University of Stuttgart, together with Anselm Rau, 20–22 November 2025
2024 Section “Fluidity and Connections in Religious Identity Construction” at the workshop “Networks of Dissent and Persecution in the Middle Ages,” University of Göttingen, Department of Medieval and Modern History, 28 May 2024
2018 Section “Problems of Reuse: Convenience and Conversion? An Exploration of Collaborative Method in Material Religion,” Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions, together with Robert Bracey and Dominic Dalglish, University of Bern, 18 June 2018
2015 Section “Iberia and Its Water: The Development of Christian Water Symbolism in Hispania over Time (5th–12th Centuries),” 16th Symposium of the Mediävistenverband, together with Achim Arbeiter and Stefan Trinks, University of Bern, 23–25 March 2015
2025–2026 Supervision of the student exhibition “Gips statt Elfenbein”, Archaeological Institute, University of Göttingen (29 October 2025 – 31 December 2026), together with Jon Cubas Díaz and Anne-Katrin Sors
2016–2018 “Those Who Follow – Arturo Soto”, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford (1 November 2017 – 20 March 2018), together with Dominic Dalglish
2012 “Portrait of the Artist As …”, Courtauld Gallery, London (26 June 2012 – 22 July 2012), together with the MA Curating the Art Museum programme, Courtauld Institute
Alessia Cavallo (student assistant at the image archive)
