Team & Partners
Ekaterina Aygün
DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Ekaterina Aygün began her studies at the St. Petersburg State University, Faculty of Asian and African Studies (Department of History of the Middle Eastern Countries, specialization – History of Turkey, graduated with distinction). In 2019 she graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University with a master’s degree in History. Her master’s thesis explored the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1913, and Ottoman women through the eyes of two journalists: one from Russia, Ariadna Tyrkova, and one from Great Britain, Grace Ellison. An article, “Rus Gazeteci Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams’ın Gözüyle 1911–1912 Yıllarında Gayrimüslim Kadınların Durumu”, based on her master’s research was published in Toplumsal Tarih (February 2020), pp. 74–77.
She currently pursues her doctoral research project that deals with Russian-speaking émigré artists in Constantinople/Istanbul in the 1920s. Her most recent publication is “Boğaz’ın Rusları: 1920’li Yıllarda Beyoğlu’ndaki Rus Göçmen Sanatçılar”, published in Toplumsal Tarih (June 2021), pp. 9–15. Research interests include Turkish-Russian relations, late Ottoman history, migration and exile, modern art and the history of women and gender.
PROF. DR. BURCU DOGRAMACI
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Burcu Dogramaci, born 1971 in Ankara, is Professor of 20th Century and Contemporary Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU). She received fellowships of the Aby M. Warburg Prize and was awarded the Kurt-Hartwig-Siemers Research Prize by the Hamburg Scientific Foundation (HWS) and the Teaching Prize 2014 by the Bavarian State Ministry.
In 2016 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her five year ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD). Her research focuses on the areas of: modern and contemporary art; exile, migration and flight; urbanity and architecture; the history and theory of photography; fashion history and theory; sculpture.
Her main monographs and edited books include: Fotografie der Performance. Live Art im Zeitalter ihrer Reproduzierbarkeit (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018); Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2017, ed. with E. Otto); Heimat. Eine künstlerische Spurensuche (Cologne: Böhlau, 2016); Fotografieren und Forschen. Wissenschaftliche Expeditionen mit der Kamera im türkischen Exil nach 1933 (Marburg: Jonas, 2013); Migration und künstlerische Produktion. Aktuelle Perspektiven(Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Netzwerke des Exils. Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2011, ed. with K. Wimmer); Kulturtransfer und nationale Identität.Deutschsprachige Architekten, Stadtplaner und Bildhauer in der Türkei nach 1927 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2008).
MAREIKE HETSCHOLD
DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Mareike Hetschold studied art history, literature and Italian in Munich and Venice.
In 2018 she graduated in Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU).
Her master’s thesis explores the work of the Swiss architect Elsa Burckhardt-Blum (1900-1974). Since 2018 she is a doctoral researcher with the ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD). Her doctoral research project deals with the visual culture in Shanghai between 1930 and 1950 in the context of exile and migration, tracing artistic practice, urban transformations and contact zones. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art history, architecture, art and urbanity, migration and exile and transcultural practice.
Publications include: Die Städtische Galerie Rosenheim – ein architekturhistorischer Blick, in: Fuhrmeister, Christian/Hauser-Mair, Monika/Steffan, Felix (eds.): Vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt. Kunst und Nationalsozialismus: Die Sammlung der Städtischen Galerie Rosenheim in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus und in den Nachkriegsjahren ( Michael Imhof Verlag 2017); Together with Sonja Hull A Case Study of the Architect’s Home: Haus Goldfinger, 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, Großbritannien, in: Burcu Dogramaci and Andreas Schätzke (eds.): A Home of One’s Own. Émigré Architects and their Houses. 1920–1950 (Axel Menges 2019).
DR. LAURA KARP LUGO
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Laura Karp Lugo has a PhD in Art History from the Sorbonne University (2014). In 2015 she was awarded the Prize of the Musée d’Orsay. From 2007, she has worked in several international research institutions and universities including the National Institute of Art History (Paris), the University UNTREF (Buenos Aires), the Open University of Catalunya (Barcelona), the University François Rabelais (Tours), the University Reims Champagne-Ardenne, the University of Nantes, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (Paris). She is currently a Postdoctoral researcher at the LMU on the ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD). Within this project, she works on Buenos Aires as an arrival city for hundreds of European artists in the first half of the 20th century.
Her bibliography includes: “L’art espagnol de l’Europe à l’Argentine: mobilités Nord-Sud, transferts et réceptions (1890-1920)”, in Artl@s Bulletin 5, n. 1 (2016), p. 38-49; “Los Caprichos de Gustavo Cochet, memorias de la Guerra Civil”, in Amnis, revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes/Amériques 2/2011; “Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century”, in Karen Carter & Susan Waller (ed.), Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914, Dorchester, Ashgate, 2015, p. 111-124; “L’ex-libris d’artiste: un nouvel espace pour l’autoreprésentation”, in Image de l’artiste, Éric Darragon & Bertrand Tillier (ed.), Territoires contemporains, serie 4.
CHRISTINA LAGAO
ERC ADMINISTRATOR
Christina Lagao supports the ERC-Project METROMOD as ERC Administrator of the Department der Kunstwissenschaften, LMU.
MAYA-SOPHIE LUTZ
PROJECT ASSISTANT
HELENE ROTH
DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Helene Roth studied Art History, Comparative Cultural Studies and Pedagogy in Paris and Munich. In 2017 she graduated from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) with a master’s degree in Art History. Her master’s thesis explored the work of the German born photographer Hermann Landshoff, who emigrated to New York during WWII and started a career in the field of fashion photography at the magazine Harper’s Bazaar.
Since 2017 she has been working as Assistant Researcher at the Institute for Art History at the LMU and for the ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD). Her research topics include art and architecture of the 20th and 21st century, urbanism, migration, exile and photography.
Since 2014 she has been working as Freelance Art Educator for the Museumspädagogisches Zentrum München, where she guides different target groups, children and youth through the art museums in Munich.
Publications include: „Photographic Practices in Cities of Exile. Camera Views on Tel Aviv and New York“ (co-edit with Anna Sophia Messner). Dogramaci, Burcu/Hetschold, Mareike/Lee, Rachel/Karp Lugo, Laura/Roth, Helene (eds.). Urban Exile. Theories, Methods, Research Practices. London: Intellect 2023, S. 120–140 (2023); „First Pictures: New York through the Lens of Emigrated European Photographers in the 1930s and 1940s“. In: Carville, Justin/Lien, Sigrid (Hrsg.). Photography as Contact Zones: Migration and Cultural Encounters in America. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021, S. 111–132, „The Bar Sammy’s Bowery Follies as Microcosm and Photographic Milieu Study for Emigrated European Photographers in 1930’s and 40’s New York“. In: Dogramaci, Burcu/Hetschold, Mareike/Lee, Rachel/Karp Lugo, Laura/Roth, Helene (Eds.). Arrival Cities. Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century, Leuven 2020, S. 293–313 and in 2019 Co-editor with Burcu Dogramaci of the volume Nomadic Camera. Fotografie, Exil und Migration, Zeitschrift für Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie (ed. Anton Holzer) (2019).
Mareike Schwarz
DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Mareike Schwarz is a research curator at the intersection of public art and public interest. She was awarded the University Prize of the City of Munich 2021 for her MA thesis. As part of her role as doctoral researcher within the ERC-project METROMOD she co-initiated the remembrance residency and its collective commissioning process. Furthermore she curated the public art performance by residency artist Franziska Windolf to commemorate urban exile artistically in the present. Apart from that, she co-edited the Bombay Archive and Walk and coordinated the panel series “Urban Exile” (12/20-02/21).
She has studied economics, literature and art history in Berlin, Cambridge, Hagen and Munich. After having been associated with the Stern Cooperation Project at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, she conducted an oral history project on curating in memorial places at the Universidad de Buenos Aires later in 2020. Against this interdisciplinary background her research ranges from urban space, socially engaged art in the context of (e)migration to the politics of memory in the 20th and 21st century. Recent publications and curating projects can be found via https://lmu-munich.academia.edu/MareikeSchwarz.
Maria Varady
PROJECT ASSISTANT
Affiliated Researchers
Dr. Lina Bernstein
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Lina Bernstein is professor emerita of Russian and comparative literature at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Gogol’s Last Book and numerous articles on Russian art, literature, and culture. She recently published a biography of the Russian artist Magda Nachman, Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile (Boston, USA, 2020). This book appeared in the author’s Russian translation in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2020. In 2019, she curated an online exhibit on Magda Nachman for Moscow’s State Museum of Oriental Cultures (the exhibition is running through 2023).
Ananya Dasgupta
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Ananya Dasgupta is a writer based in Mumbai. She has been a journalist with The Telegraph in Kolkata, India, and an editor with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Archives in Mumbai. She has co-authored the book A Masterful Spirit: Homi Jehangir Bhabha, 1909-1966 (Penguin Books, 2010). She is also an author of children’s books, including There’s a Hole in my Galaxy (Pratham Books, 2019).
Dr. Margit Franz
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Margit Franz’s work put British India, as well as other Asian and African countries, on the global map of countries of exile for Central European refugees during WW II. With Gateway India: Deutschsprachiges Exil in Indien zwischen Kolonialherrschaft, Maharadschas und Gandhi she received her habilitation in contemporary history from the University of Graz in 2019. With Going East, Going South. Österreichisches Exil in Asien und Afrika (edited with Heimo Halbrainer, 2014) she opened a “colonial turn” (Atina Grossmann) in historical exile studies by merging her expertise in international development and peace studies with historical research. With Exile in Transit (in Exil in Asien, 2015) she began to discuss postcolonial conditions in young nation states (“fragile states”) in Asia and Africa for refugees from National Socialism. She operates on the interface between socio-economic history, gender studies, transcultural transfer and network studies, international development studies, exile studies, and art history. Her current research focuses on contextualized biographies of exiled artists, art-connoisseurs and art-critics in India, like Walter and Käthe Langhammer, Rudolf and Albrecht von Leyden, Emanuel Schlesinger, among others.
Margit Franz studied history, geography, adult education, international development studies and peace research at the University of Graz (Austria) with several international scholarships (in Oslo, New Delhi, Amherst & Northampton/MA/USA, Dartington/UK). Her current book and exhibition projects include the biographies of Rudolf von Leyden and Walter Langhammer, the unknown Gandhian disciple Franziska Standenath, female Austrian migrants to India and an updated and expanded English version of Gateway India. She is a founding member and active researcher of CLIO, Verein für Geschichts- und Bildungsarbeit Graz. She lived in India for several years for her research, but also feels at home in Canada and New Zealand.
Her most recent publications include “Die multiplen Identitäten und Loyalitäten der Käthe Langhammer.” (Das Exil von Frauen, 2020) and “From Dinner Parties to Galleries: The Langhammer-Leyden-Schlesinger Circle in Bombay – 1940s through the 1950s” (Arrival Cities, 2020)
Amrit Gangar
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based author, film theorist, curator and historian. On behalf of Goethe Institut Mumbai he has written books on three German exiles, viz. Franz Osten (film director, Bombay Talkies), Paul Zils (pioneering documentary filmmaker in India) and Walter Kaufmann (musicologist and a director All India Radio). He has presented his theory of Cinema of Prayoga in India and abroad including the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; the Lodz Film School, Poland; the Visva Bharati University (Santiniketan), West Bengal, India, etc. Gangar has worked on several film and video installation projects from Europe and Scandinavia shot in India and also made some short films himself. Gangar was the consultant curator for the National Museum of Indian Cinema, the first such museum in the country set up by the Government of India. He also curated film programs for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala; the Kala Ghoda Artfest, Mumbai, and for the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) for Short, Documentary & Animation Films. Gangar has served on a number of national and international juries of film festivals. He writes both in English and Gujarati languages. He had also been a long time activist in Indian film society movement and was awarded for his work by the Federation of International Cinema Clubs in Berlin, 1989.
Dr. Katya Knyazeva
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Katya Knyazeva, from Novosibirsk, Russia, is a historian and a journalist with a focus on urban form, heritage preservation and the Russian diaspora. She is the author of the two-volume history and photographic atlas Shanghai Old Town. Topography of a Phantom City (Suzhou Creek Press, 2015 and 2018). Her articles on history and architecture appear in international media and her blog avezink.livejournal.com. Her scholarly writing can be found in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China, Global History and Built Heritage. Knyazeva received her second Master’s degree at the Bologna University and is presently a Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy.
Her publications include: “The case of Qiaojia Road: the redevelopment of Shanghai’s old town”, in R. Wakeman (ed.), Recreating Shanghai (Springer, 2020); “Building Russian Shanghai: the Architectural Legacy of the Diaspora”, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China (Hong Kong, 2019); “Cafes and Cabarets: The food culture of the Russian diaspora in Shanghai, 1920–1950”, in I. Porciani (ed.), Food Heritage and Nationalism (Routledge, 2019); “The Scribe of Russian Shanghai: Vladimir Zhiganov and his perennial masterpiece,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China (Hong Kong, 2017), and others.
Dr. Eduard Kögel
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Eduard Kögel studied urban and landscape planning at the University of Kassel (GhK) and received his doctorate from the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar. He has written widely on the history of architecture; his books include The Chinese City and The Grand Documentation. Ernst Boerschmann and Religious Architecture in China and EXH Design. Swiss quality, Chinese speed. Eduard Kögel is also a research consultant and program curator for ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory Berlin, and curated several exhibitions on contemporary Chinese architecture at the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin. Since 2006, he has curated the website chinese-architects.com. He teaches regularly at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and is a member of the board of stadtkultur international eV. He is currently working on the Contested Modernities project, which addresses the legacy of modern architecture and urban development in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Rachel Lee
Affiliated Researcher
Rachel Lee is an assistant professor at the TU Delft’s History of Architecture and Urban Planning Chair, and, after three years as a full-time team member, she is now an affiliated researcher with METROMOD. Her research explores the histories of colonial and postcolonial architecture and urbanism at their intersections with migration and exile, transnational practice, heritage, mobility, and gender, particularly in South Asia and East Africa. She is currently also a Mellon Fellow with the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s “Centring Africa” project.
Recent publications include “Engaging the Archival Habitat: Architectural Knowledge and Otto Koenigsberger’s Effects.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Special Section: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge, vol. 40, no. 3, December 2020, 526–540, “Unlikely Collaborations? Planning Experts from Both Sides of the Iron Curtain and the Making of Abuja.” Transforming Cities: Urbanization and International Development in Africa and Latin America since 1945, special issue of Comparativ, vol. 30, no. 1/2, December 2020, 38–59 (with Anne-Katrin Fenk and Monika Motylińska), and “Hospitable Environments: The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and Green’s Hotel as Sites of Cultural Production in Bombay.” Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century, edited by Burcu Dogramaci et al., University of Leuven, 2020, 249–268.
Prof. Dr. Partha Mitter
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Partha Mitter, Hon. D. Lit. (Courtauld Institute, London University); Emeritus Professor, Sussex University; Adjunct Professor Carleton University, Canada; Member, Wolfson College, Oxford. Fellowships include: Churchill College and Clare Hall, Cambridge; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Getty Research Institute Los Angeles; Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Books include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977, Chicago University Press 1992 (paperback), Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2013 (new edition); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Indian Art, Oxford University Press, 2002; The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947, Reaktion Books, London and Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2007. Article: ‘Interventions: Decentring Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, Art Bulletin, Volume XC, Number 4 (December, 2008), 531-574.
Dr. Christoph von Ungern-Sternberg
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Dr. Christoph von Ungern-Sternberg studied German literature and history in Regensburg and Berlin. He received his doctorate from Humboldt University with a thesis on Willy Haas (Willy Haas 1891-1973, “Ein grosser Regisseur der Literatur”, edition text+kritik 2007). For this, he also conducted intensive research on Haas’ time in Indian exile, the hitherto hardly explored period in the life of the editor, screenwriter and critic.
Dr. Simone Wille
AFFILIATED RESEARCHER
Simone Wille is an art historian, based in Vienna. From 2016 to 2021 she directed the research project Patterns of Trans-regional Trails. The materiality of Art Works and Their Place in the Modern Era. Bombay, Paris, Prague, Lahore, ca. 1920s to early 1950s (P29536-G26) and from 2021 to 2025 she directs the research project South Asia in Central Europe. The Mobility of Artists and Art Works between 1947 and 1989 (V 880-G), both fully funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF. Wille is affiliated with the University of Innsbruck where she regularly lectures on transnational developments of 19th and 20th century modernist art.
Her publications include her book Modern Art in Pakistan. History, Tradition, Place. New Delhi: Routledge, 2015 and the edited volume André Lhote and His International Students, Zeynep Kuban, Simone Wille (eds.), Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2020.
Her research focuses on 19th and 20th century transnational modernist art; South Asian modernism; socialist communist movements; decentered, multi-site, mobile and ‘entangled’ accounts of modernist art-trajectories and networks.
Partners
Jamal Buscher
Art Director
Jamal Buscher studied communication design in Essen. In 2017, he graduated from Folkwang University of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in communication design.
Since 2017, he has been working as a designer and art director for the Bureau Johannes Erler and as a freelancer for many other clients. He has already received several awards for his work from the Art Directors Club Germany.
Johannes Erler
Art Director
Johannes Erler is an art director and communication designer. With his Bureau Johannes Erler he is responsible for the conception and design of Metromod’s website.
Bureau Johannes Erler conceives and designs corporate identities and communication strategies for companies and institutions and has won numerous design awards with its work over the past 12 years. Clients from the fields of culture and business include Die Staatstheater Stuttgart, Mercedes Benz and SPIEGEL magazine. Erler is also a member of design juries, guest lecturer and book author.
https://bureau-erler.de/
LAB1100
Data scientists
LAB1100 is a research and development firm established in 2011 by Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels. LAB1100 brings together skills in new media, history, and software development. Working together with universities, research institutes, and museums, LAB1100 has built the digital research platform nodegoat and produces interactive data visualisations.
https://nodegoat.net/
https://lab1100.com/