PROFILE
Dr Susanne Meurer
Started at UWA: 2012
Internationally trained art historian
Archival documents and artworks can bring the past to life and highlight shared concerns or larger patterns in history. It is a privilege to be able to share this passion for history with students and the broader public.Dr Susanne Meurer
Dr Susanne Meurer is an internationally trained specialist on prints and the history of art history.
Originally from Germany, Dr Meurer studied in London and worked as a print cataloguer at the British Museum. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Warburg Institute (London) and the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institute) in Florence before taking up her position in Perth.
Dr Meurer is currently completing a monograph on the earliest collection of artist biographies written in German, Johann Neudörffer’s Notes on Nuremberg’s Artists and Craftsmen (1547), examining how the idea to record the achievements of local artists is shaped by an emerging sense of history and the intention to commit personal knowledge to communal memory.
Neudörffer’s text contributed to the perception of Nuremberg as a leading artistic centre of the German Renaissance. As elsewhere, the writing of art history as a history of artists and their biographies long determined a canon of prominent artists whose works dominated the discipline.
Understanding how canons of art were formed allows us to understand both them and – in turn – the previously marginal as constructs.
Qualifications:
- BA (Goldsmiths College, London)
- MA (Warburg Institute, London)
- PhD (Warburg Institute, London)
Eleanor M Garvey Fellow
Eleanor M. Garvey Fellow in Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard University (2017)
Book Coeditor
Coeditor of Aus aller Herren Länder – Die Künstler der Teutschen Academie, Brepols (2015)
Alumni Fund Grant
Alumni Fund Grant for Animated Art: Enhanced Learning through Gamification with Rene van Meeuwen and Arvi Wattel (2016)
Funding
2017
ARC Centre for the History of Emotions
- Entangled Histories of Emotions in the Mediterranean World with Giovanni Tarantino and Arvi Wattel
2016
Eleanor M. Garvey Fellowship in Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard University Cambridge/Mass
- Project on Johann Neudörffer’s engagement with printmaking
2016
UWA Alumni Fund Grant
- Animated Art: Enhanced Learning through Gamification with Rene Van Meeuwen and Arvi Wattel
Teaching
Supervisor opportunities
Dr Meurer has been supervising postgraduate students for six years, covering topics as diverse as contemporary curatorial practices, German architectural history and urban planning, printmaking and collective memory.
She welcomes expressions of interest for postgraduate study in the history of early modern art (1400-1800), printmaking, book history, curation, or German cultural history.
Contact Dr Meurer via the details below to discuss further.
