Julia Bärnighausen is a PhD candidate at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. In 2015–2018 she was an academic collaborator on the collaborative research project “Photo-Objects” at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. Her dissertation focuses on photographic and archival practices of art dealers around 1900. Bärnighausen studied art history and history in Berlin and London. Former places of work include the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung in Berlin, Das Technische Bild at Humboldt-Universität, and the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Costanza Caraffa has been Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut since 2006. She holds a Master’s degree in architecture and a PhD in art history. In 2009 Caraffa initiated the “Photo Archives” conference series and authored the Florence Declaration – Recommendations for the Preservation of Analogue Photo Archives. She edited, inter alia, Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (2011) and Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (2015, with Tiziana Serena). She was coordinator of the collaborative research project “Photo-Objects.”
Zeynep Çelik is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology-Rutgers University and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Her publications include The Remaking of Istanbul (1986), Displaying the Orient (1992), Camera Ottomana (2014), and About Antiquities. Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (2016). She co-curated several exhibitions, among them “Walls of Algiers,” Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2009) and Camera Ottomana, Koc University, Istanbul (2015). Çelik has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
İdil Çetin earned a PhD in political science at Galatasaray University, Turkey. Her dissertation project concerns the photographs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from the late Ottoman Empire up until his death in 1938. Her research focuses on the circulation of the photographs in the press as well as in the public sphere to reveal the link between state and imagery. Apart from conducting her own research on the visual history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, Çetin also works as a part-time lecturer at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey.
Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is also a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and has been awarded the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis. Her publications include Objectivity (with Peter Galison, 2007), Histories of Scientific Observation (with Elizabeth Lunbeck, 2011), and How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (with Paul Erikson et al., 2013). Daston is currently at work on a book about the history of rules.
Elizabeth Edwards, visual and historical anthropologist, is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University and joined the V&A Research Institute as Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor in 2016. She is also Honorary Professor in the Anthropology Department at UCL and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Her most recent monograph was The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885–1918 (2012). Edwards’ current book projects are on photography and concepts of the collective ownership of ancient monuments and on photography and the apparatus and practice of history.
Haidy Geismar is Professor of Anthropology at University College London (UCL), Co-director of the Digital Anthropology Program, and Vice-Dean of Strategic Projects for Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at UCL. She is also co-curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections and Chair of the Royal Anthropological Institute Photographic Committee. Geismar holds a PhD in anthropology and material culture from UCL (2003). She has long-term fieldwork experience in the South Pacific and within museums in the Pacific, North America, and Europe. She is currently working on the research project "Finding Photography. Exploring the Material and Social Networks Underpinning Contemporary Art Photography" with Prof. Pip Laurenson, Tate Gallery, and Maastricht University.
Lena Holbein studied art history and media science in Braunschweig, Bochum, and Toulouse. She holds a Masters degree in history of modern and contemporary art from the Ruhr-University Bochum. Since October 2016 she is fellow in the graduate researcher group “Das fotografische Dispositiv” (HBK Braunschweig); since April 2018 she is also associate researcher in the graduate researcher group “Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug.” Her PhD project examines archival strategies in contemporary art practices using found photographs.
Stefanie Klamm is an art/visual historian and historian of science based in Berlin. She recently started a new research project on the history of the Gotha Collections at Gotha Research Centre, University of Erfurt. She was an academic collaborator in the collaborative research project “Photo-Objects” at the Collection of Photography, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Stefanie Klamm began her academic training with studies in history, classical archaeology, cultural studies, and philosophy. In 2012, she completed a dissertation on the history of archaeological visualization at the Institute of Art History and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She co-curated the exhibition “Photography in World War I” at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2014). Stefanie Klamm has received several fellowships, for example, at the Getty Research Institute Los Angeles.
Pip Laurenson is Head of Collection Care Research at Tate and Professor of Art Collection and Care at Maastricht University. She has over twenty years of experience in the conservation of contemporary art, beginning her career at Tate in 1992 and going on to establish and lead Tate’s Time-based Media Conservation section. In her current role, Pip develops, leads, and supports research related to the conservation and management of Tate's collections. She received her PhD from University College London, is an accredited member of the Institute for Conservation, a trustee of the UK’s National Science and Heritage Forum, and a member of the Steering Committee of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA).
Maria Männig is a postdoctoral researcher in the Media Theory Department at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). She holds a PhD in art history from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, a master’s degree in art history (University of Vienna), and a second one in visual arts (Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna). Her main research topics are the Vienna School of Art History, digital art history (internet cultures and the materiality of the digital), and the history of art historical slide projection. In 2017, her monograph Hans Sedlmayrs Kunstgeschichte. Eine kritische Studie was published.
Anaïs Mauuarin holds a PhD at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, titled Anthropology Put to the Test of Pictures:Anthropology and Photography in France, 1930–1960 (2018), currently in press. Mauuarin has published several articles on this topic, coordinated a special issue of the journal Gradhiva, “Sur le vif: photography and anthropology” (27, 2018) and is currently undertaking research on the visual culture of anthropology and the building of colonial imagery.
Suryanandini Narain is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She teaches courses on Indian visual culture, photography, and critical writing. Her doctoral thesis addresses the feminine figure in family photographs from Delhi. Narain is a recipient of scholarships from the Ford Foundation, INLAKS foundation, and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. She has also been involved as an assistant editor for various Marg magazines and volumes. She has spoken on the subject of photography at various institutions and has published in a number of academic journals and catalogues.
Before taking up his current post as Professor for the History of Science at the University of Regensburg, Omar Nasim was based at the Centre for the History of Sciences at the University of Kent (Canterbury) and a Newton International Fellow at Oxford University. He has also worked at the ETH Zurich, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Nasim has authored two award-winning monographs, including Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (2013), which won the History of Science Society’s prestigious Pfizer Award in 2016.
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. He has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, University of Chicago, University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), and Jagiellonian University (Kraków). His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India. He has also worked on industrial labor and Dalit goddess possession. Pinney is the author of Camera Indica (1997), Photography and Anthropology (2011), The Waterless Sea (2018) and Lessons from Hell (2018).
Christina Riggs is a historian of ancient Egyptian art and Egyptology. Her current research focuses on the history of photography and archaeology, using archives formed during and after the 1920s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. She has recently published the monograph Photographing Tutankhamun (2019), for the Bloomsbury series Photography, History: History, Photography, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Jennifer Tucker, and Patricia Hayes. Since 2019, she has been Professor of the History of Visual Culture in the history department of Durham University, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She has previously worked at the University of East Anglia, The Queen’s College, Oxford, Manchester Museum, and the University of Cambridge.
Franka Schneider is a European ethnologist and historian. She was an academic collaborator on the cooperative project “Photo-Objects” at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She has worked and taught at institutes of European ethnology at the universities of Göttingen, Hamburg, and Berlin. Her research areas include practices of production and circulation of ethnographic knowledge, the history of popular culture, material culture, and anthropology of the city.
Joan M. Schwartz is Professor of History of Photography in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, where she is cross-appointed to the Department of Geography and Planning. She is also an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. A historical geographer and archival theorist, she has a dual scholarly focus on the power of archives and photographs to shape notions of place and identity, history and memory. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and the Society of American Archivists, she is co-editor of Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (2003) and is currently working on an exhibition and book on the life, landscapes, and legacy of nineteenth-century British Columbia photographer Frederick Dally.
Katharina Sykora is Professor Emerita of Art History at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and initiator of the PhD program The Photographic Dispositif (2013–2019). She was Professor of Art History at the Ruhr University, Bochum, Max Kade Guest Professor at the University of Bloomington, Indiana and is elected Distinguished Harris Professor, Dartmouth College. Sykora was awarded an Opus Magnum fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation, was a Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, and was nominated Senior Fellow at the Internationales Institut für Kulturforschung (IFK), Vienna. She has co-curated several exhibitions. Amongst her most recent publications is The Deaths of Photography (2 volumes, 2009 and 2015).
Petra Trnková is a Senior Research Fellow and a curator of the photographic collection at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Her research interests center around nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography. She (co-)authored and (co-)edited several books, including Oudadate Pix: Revealing a Photographic Archive (2010) and Landscape – Residence – Image: Georg Johann Buquoy’s Romantic Order (2015). At present, Trnková is completing a monograph on the beginnings of photography in Central Europe (forthcoming). She received her PhD in art history in 2008 from Masaryk University in Brno.
Kelley Wilder is Director of the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester. Particular research interests cover photographic methods in the sciences, the science of the archive, industrial histories, and science photography exhibitions. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2003 and has since worked as Assistant Editor to the Talbot Correspondence, as the co-editor of Roger Fenton’s Crimean letterbooks, and for the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Wilder is the author of Photography and Science (2009) and co-author of Documenting the World: Film, Photography and the Scientific Record (2016).
Petra Wodtke lives and works in Berlin with a focus on scientific communication and material culture studies in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research collaborations and cooperation. She is currently Academic Coordinator within the Excellence Cluster Temporal Communities in Berlin. She was an academic collaborator on the cooperative project “Photo-Objects” at the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. At the same time she was part of the research management team of the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin. After her studies of archaeology and Latin in Berlin, Vienna, and Lausanne, she had a scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Gießen. In 2014, Wodtke completed her PhD in classical archaeology about communication structures of, with, and through archaeological objects in the Roman province of Epirus.