Prof. Dr. Michael F. Zimmermann

Michael F. Zimmermann holds, since 2004, the chair for art history at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. He studied art history, philosophy and history in Cologne, Rome and Paris. After, he was, amongst others, deputy director at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (1991-2002) and ordinary professor at the Université de Lausanne (2002-04). He ist ordinary member of the Academia Europaea, London, and of the Bavarian Academy of Science, where he directs, until mid-2022, a working group Multiculturality and Identity. Since 2003, he is founding member of the International Network for Art History, and, since 2020, of the editorial board of the journal XXI. Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Since 2016, he is speaker of the BA- and MA-programs Aisthesis. Culture and Media at the Catholic University.

His PhD-thesis (1985, Cologne), Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, was published, in 1991, in several languages. His habilitation thesis (2000, FU) Industrialisierung der Phantasie. Malerei, illustrierte Presse und das Mediensystem der Künste in Italien, 1875-1900 was released in 2006. Recently, he published essays about Bruegel, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Odilon Redon, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Allan Sekula, each in context with debates in the history of science and knowledge, and about Bachtin, Benjamin, Foucault and Agamben. Current research interests focus on historical and actual visual and media environments as well as in knowledge situated within them – studied from the point of view of a strictly participatory theory of practice(s) and epistemology.