Kunsthistorisches Institut
Portrait Megan Luke

Prof. Dr. Megan R. Luke

Professur für Kunst der Moderne und Gegenwart

Stellvertretende geschäftsführende Direktorin

Raum 109
+49 (0)7071 29-78776
megan.lukespam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de
WS 25/26: Sprechstunde dienstags 14-16 Uhr.

Team

Vita

Narrativer Lebenslauf (in English)

Megan R. Luke is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Institute of Art History at the Universität Tübingen. She teaches the history of modern art, architecture, and art writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research focuses on the histories of abstraction, collage, and reproductive media, with particular interests in the history of sculpture, the art of exile and migration, and theories of the image.

A native of Los Angeles, she received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to joining the Tübingen faculty in 2023, she taught at the University of Southern California, where she was promoted with tenure in 2017, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where she also held the position of Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Art History Department. She has been a visiting scholar at eikones Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichte des Bildes, Universität Basel; Freie Universität, Berlin; Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich; and the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA), Zurich. 

Prof. Luke is currently directing two international research projects: Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in ‘East-Central Europe,’ 1910−1930s, with funding from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories Initiative, and  Images Out of Time, an interdisciplinary partnership with colleagues in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, History, and Religion funded by the National Endownment of the Humanities. Her research has received support from major fellowships in art history and the humanities, including the William C. Seitz Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; and multiple fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Her first book, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago 2014), was awarded the 2015 Robert Motherwell Book Award, an honorable mention in Art History for the 2015 PROSE Awards, an inaugural Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award from the College Art Association, and recognition from the Henry Moore Foundation. Prof. Luke is also the editor of the comprehensive English translation of Schwitters’s theoretical writing and criticism, Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism (Chicago, 2021); she currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation in Hannover.

Her current monograph, Sculpture in an Age of Mass Reproduction: Untimely Objects of German Modernism, considers how the development of reproductive technologies remade the sculptural object and its claims to embody the past in the present. Through the sculpture of Max Klinger, the photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch, and the writing of Carola Giedion-Welcker, this book considers how the advent of synthetic materials and the mass reproduction of images and things have intellibly shaped our understanding of what sculpture is and does. Prof. Luke has explored related topics in numerous publications, including the volume she co-edited (with Sarah Hamill), Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (Getty, 2017).  
Her writing on art spanning from the late nineteenth century through the present has appeared in Art Bulletin, Art History, kritische berichte, OCTOBER, Oxford Art Journal, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Texte zur Kunst, and West 86th, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues for museums in the United States, Germany, and Austria. She has supported over twenty PhD dissertations to completion, on topics in the history of photography, interwar graphic design, international avant-garde networks in Central and Eastern Europe, and post-WWII German and U.S. painting and sculpture.
Prospective doctoral candidates should consult the guidelines here prior to requesting supervision of potential dissertations.

Follow this link to download the CV as a PDF document.

Forschung

Forschungsschwerpunkte
  • Kunst, Architektur und Kunstkritik des 19. und 20. Jh.
  • Geschichte der Fotografie und Faksimilereproduktion
  • Abstraktion, Collage und Raumgestaltung
  • Kunst im Exil
  • Historiografie der Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft
Forschungsprojekte

2022–2025: Initiatorin und Mitglied der Forschungsgruppe „Images Out of Time: Visual and Material Culture in a Digital Age,“ Humanities Initiatives for Colleges and Universities, National Endowment of the Humanities am USC Visual Studies Research Institute

2025–2027: Project Director, “Modernism's Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in ‘East-Central-Europe’, 1910-1930s”, Connecting Art Histories, Getty Foundation

Publikationen

Monographien / Herausgeberschaften

Aufsätze

  • “Monuments and Miniatures in the Photogrammetric Imagination,” in Scalability and its Limits in Photography and (Digital) Sculpture, eds. Buket Altinoba, Maria Männig, and Ursula Ströbele (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026), 128–43.
    https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111374888/html
  • “Der Autor als Ersatzteil. Albert Renger-Patzsch in den 1950er Jahren”, Fotogeschichte 168 (2023): 11-20.
  • “The Ghost and the Rock: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Shape of Time,” Art History 46, no. 1 (February 2023): 124–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12696.
  • “Metalwork and Serial Sculpture in Germany, 1870–1930,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 28, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2021): 284–89.
  • “An Introduction to Merz-Thought,” in Kurt Schwitters, Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), xiii–xxvi.
  • “The Factotum of Industry: Max Klinger’s Beethoven,” kritische berichte 48, no. 3 (October 2020): 81–94.
  • “Formlinge: Carola Giedion-Welcker, Hans Arp, and the Prehistory of Modern Sculpture,” Hans Arp and Other Masters of 20th Century Sculpture, ed. Jana Teuscher and Elisa Tamaschke (Berlin: Stiftung Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 2020), 54–67.
  • “A Picture is a Shaped Thing” [on Frank Stella, Michael Fried, and Max Imdahl], OCTOBER 168 (Spring 2019): 148–65; deutsche Übersetzung, “Ein Bild ist ein geformtes Ding,” in Michael Frieds “Shape as Form” und die Kritik der Form von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Ralph Ubl and Rahel Villinger (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2018), 103–122.
  • “Modern Sculpture, A Photobook,” in Instant Presence: Representing Art in Photography, ed. Hana Buddeus (Prague: Artefactum, 2018), 198–216.
  • “Painting in the Round,” Getty Research Journal no. 9, S1: Special Issue on Jackson Pollock’s Mural (2017): 149–82.
  • “Artificial Blindness: Objecthood and the Photography of Sculpture,” in Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction, eds. Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2017), 138–52.
  • Mit Sarah Hamill, “Reproductive Vision: Photography as a History of Sculpture,” in Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction, eds. Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2017), 1–32.
  • “Our Life Together: Collective Homemaking in the Films of Ella Bergmann-Michel,” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2017): 27–48; deutsche Übersetzung, “Unser Zusammenleben: Kollektive Haushaltsführung in den Filmen von Ella Bergmann-Michel,” in Ella Bergmann-Michel und Robert Michel—Ein Künstlerpaar der Moderne ed. Karin Orchard (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 2018), 105–17.
  • “The Wandering ‘Merzbau,’” in CIHA 2012: The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts. Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, eds. G. Ulrich Großmann, Petra Krutisch, and Almuth Klein (Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013), 1242–44.
  • “Sculpture for the Hand: Herbert Read in the Studio of Kurt Schwitters,” Art History 35.2, Special Issue, “British Art and the Cultural Field, 1939-69” (April 2012): 234­–251; republished in British Art and the Cultural Field, eds. Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 36–53.
  • “The Photographic Reproduction of Space: Wölfflin, Kracauer, Panofsky,” RES. Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 339–43.
  • “Spazio irradiante, fantasmagoria didascalica [Radiating Space, Didactic Phantasmagoria],” in Kurt Schwitters. Riga 29, ed. Elio Grazioli (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2009), 256–64.
  • “Objecting to Things,” in Frank Stella 1958, eds. Harry Cooper and Megan R. Luke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 1–65.

Beiträge in Ausstellungskatalogen

  • “The Consequences of Things”, in Medardo Rosso, ed. Heike Eipeldauer (Cologne and Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2024), 64-78.
  • “Sculpture in an Age of Mass Reproduction,” Future Bodies from a Recent Past: Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s (Munich: Museum Brandhorst, 2022), 195–202.
  • “A Withdrawal from Appearance: George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters,” in Private Passion, Civic Spirit: Robert Gore Rifkind and German Expressionism, eds. Stephanie Barron and Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), 72–79.
  • “Kurt Schwitters: Systemschrift,” in Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939, eds. Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 208–13.
  • “Hall of Mirrors,” in Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty, ed. Gavin Delahunty (Dallas and Amsterdam: Dallas Museum of Art/Stedelijk Museum, 2018), 84–91.
  • “The Art History of Intensive Intentions: Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Harald Szeemann: The Kingdom of Obsessions, eds. Glenn Phillips and Philipp Kaiser (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum and Getty Research Institute, 2018), 182–99; deutsche Übersetzung, “Eine Kunstgeschichte intensiver Intentionen,” in Harald Szeemann. Museum der Obsessionen (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2018), 183–200.
  • “The Trace of Transfer: Displacement on Paper” in Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope, ed. Frauke Josenhans (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017), 128–41.
  • “Corollary Happenings: On Frederick Kielser’s Galaxies,” in Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions, eds. Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Bärbel Vischer (Vienna: MAK Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst, 2016), 166–171.
  • “Still Life/Commodity,” in New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, eds. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015), 228–41.
  • “Togetherness in Exile: Kurt Schwitters’ English Sculptures,” in Schwitters in Britain, eds. Emma Chambers and Karin Orchard (London: Tate Britain, 2013), 42–55; deutsche Übersetzung, “Miteinander im Exil,” Schwitters in Britain (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2013), 42–55.
  • “Kurt Schwitters,” in Eye on a Century: Modern & Contemporary Art from the Collection of Charles B. Benenson, ed. Cathleen Chaffee (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2012), 46–48.