Tanja SchultSenior lecturer, associate professor
About me
For Schult's ongoing activities, please see: linkedin.com/in/tanja-schult-33697688
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Schult's research focuses on Holocaust memory, on how monuments renegotiate questions of identity and participation, and how art’s efficacy can be captured through audience reception.
Already in her doctoral thesis, Schult started to investigate how democratic ideas have affected monuments’ themes and designs, and demonstrated how the genre shows a significant capacity to rejuvenate, producing new designs which can stimulate self-reflectiveness and critical thinking. By using performativity as a theoretical concept, she was able to identify what characterises a ‘democratic monument’ in terms of content, design, coming into existence, and its being in the world, and how these factors mutually interrelate. Her current research investigates the relationship between democratic ideas and monument making in the 21st century further.
Schult has published widely on Holocaust memory and the monument genre.
SHORT CV
Tanja Schult has studied Art History, Scandinavian Studies and Theatre Studies in Germany and Sweden.
2007: PhD, Humboldt University, Berlin
2009-12: researcher and teacher at Stockholm University, Department of History; research project: The Holocaust in Swedish Art (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond)
2012-14: senior lecturer at the Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University, responsible for the Master courses "The Holocaust in European History" and "the Holocaust in European Historiography".
2015-18: researcher and teacher at Stockholm University, Department of Culture and Aesthetics; research project: Making the Past Present: Public Perceptions of Performative Holocaust Commemoration since the year 2000 (funded by the Swedish Research Council), carried out together with Diana I. Popescu (UK).
2021/2021: granted SU-Sabbatical, guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna.
2023-2026: research project: Rethink and Reload - Monuments in 21st Century Democracies (funded by the Swedish Research Council), carries out together with Tim Cole (UK).
2024: granted RJ-Sabbatical for book project: The Democratic Potential of Monuments in the 21st Century - Creating Sites for Participation, Social Justice and Critical Discourse.
TEACHING
Schult teaches courses on Visual Studies, Visual and Material Culture, Public Art, Performativity, and Doing Art History. She supervises students on Undergraduate, Master and Phd level.
