Dr.phil.
Romana Sammern
Romana Sammern is Academic Programme Coordinator of the programme area Figurations of Transition at the inter-university institute Wissenschaft & Kunst, a collaboration between the Mozarteum University Salzburg and the University of Salzburg. An art historian, her research explores how images have shaped ideas of the body, beauty and medicine, bringing together art history, cultural studies and the history of science.
Romana Sammern studied history, cultural studies and art history in Salzburg, Vienna and Berlin before completing her doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin with a thesis on the pictorial representation of prostitutes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, published as Hurenbilder (Böhlau, 2014).
She subsequently held research positions at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute, where she developed projects on originality and copying in the early modern period.
Supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Sammern led the research project Face and Image, examining the relationship between art and cosmetics at the intersection of art history and the history of science. The project was first funded through the FWF's Hertha Firnberg Programme and later continued as part of the Elise Richter Programme.
Her research spans early modern art, visual culture, medicine, gender and the history of science, with a particular focus on the relationships between body, image and scientific knowledge.