christian.berger[at]uni-siegen.de
universität-siegen.academia.edu/ChristianBerger
Christian Berger is a historian of modern and contemporary art and Professor of Art History at Universität Siegen. He received his M.A. (2007) and Ph.D. (2013) from Freie Universität Berlin and obtained his Habilitation from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2022). He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt (2022) and Hamburg (2021–22) and was a research fellow and lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2010–22) and at Philipps-Universität Marburg (2007–10).
He has been awarded several major grants, by the European Union, the Terra, the Thyssen, and the Volkswagen Foundation, among others, which have enabled him to conduct his research at international institutions such as KWI Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (2023), The Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2017–19), the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2015–16), and the DFK German Center for Art History in Paris (2009–10). His scholarly interests focus on issues of materiality and artistic production as well as on the transformations of artistic practice since the long 1960s and on the growing importance of transnational perspectives for contemporary art.
Christian Berger has published a book on repetition and experiment as artistic strategies in the work of Edgar Degas (Wiederholung und Experiment bei Edgar Degas, Berlin: Reimer, 2014), and is the editor of Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019) as well as co-editor of Sublimation/Sublimierung: Redefining Materiality in Art after Modernism (Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, special issue 19, 2021) and of Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s (Visual Resources, special issue, 2016). He serves as an editorial board member of Studies in Art & Materiality, a peer-reviewed book series at Brill.