Sara KUEHN

MA7-Fellow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trained as an art historian (Ph.D. in Islamic art and archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin, 2008; M.A. in Islamic art and archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1998; B.A. in Chinese, Japanese and Korean art and archaeology, International Christian University, Tokyo, 1991) and working on religious symbolism for more than twenty years, Dr Sara Kuehn studies religion from a cross-cultural comparative perspective. Her dual background in Islamic and East Asian art histories, combined with extensive field research in the Near East, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe, as well as a museum career, shaped her conceptualisation of the artistic and religio-cultural relationship between the Islamic world, Western Asia, and Europe. In the framework of World Heritage missions and other consulting activities for the UNESCO and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), she conducted regular missions to the Middle East between 1998 and 2008, in particular in collaboration with the Kuwait National Museum, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah (al-Sabah Collection). Her book The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (with a Foreword by Robert Hillenbrand, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011) won the 2013 World Prize for the Book of the Year of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She has been awarded several prestigious grants and scholarships: during 2012–2013, she was postdoctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) der Max Weber Stiftung; during 2013–2014, EURIAS/Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions junior fellow at the New Europe College-Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, Romania; in 2015, research fellow at the IMéRA (Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University - AMU); in 2016, research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), France; and in 2017-2018, overseas research fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU), Suita, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Her current research focuses on religious visual culture in an interreligious perspective, especially on cosmographies and imaginary journeys, hybrid beings, angels and angelology as well as the migration and cross-cultural dimensions of objects, ideas, and images. Dr. Kuehn is involved in the research project "Die visuelle Kultur des Sufismus in Wien: Einblicke in die Blickkultur des mystischen Islam am Beispiel der Chishti-Inayati und der Halveti-Dscherrahi" [The Visual Culture of Sufism in Vienna: Ways of Viewing in the Mystical Islam of the Chishti-Inayati and the Halveti-Jerrahi].