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Faculty
Faculty Directory
Cordula Grewe
Associate Professor
19th-century German Painting
Ph.D., Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, 1998

Biography
How do artistic practices and visual strategies mediate and meet the religious, philosophical, and expressive needs of the society that produces them? How does art in the wider sense reflect, embody, and respond to the political and social life of its cultural setting? These questions form the vital interest of Professor Grewe's research and teaching in the field of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. Her current research centers on German art and culture of this period, and she is at present working on a manuscript on Painting Religion: Art and the Sacred Imaginary in German Romanticism (Ashgate Publishing). The project investigates the evolution of religious painting in the first half of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the art of the Nazarenes, the book explores the question of how a modern historicist perspective came to serve as the foundation for a new religious idiom in art. Professor Grewe plans to continue this project into the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the return of realism to religious art. Beside her work on the connection between Romanticism, religion, and visual piety, Professor Grewe has begun an examination of the symbolic role of the body, and pursues her interest in the relationship between word and image through an investigation of book illustration and the early comic strip, as well as the phenomenon of the tableau vivant. She has published on Wilhelm von Schadow, the Düsseldorf School of Painting, and nineteenth-century German art as well as on the Northern Renaissance, and contemporary sculpture.

Formally trained in Art History, Modern and Contemporary History, History of the Middle Ages and Latin of the Middle Ages, Cordula Grewe received an M.A. from American University, Washington D. C. (1992), and a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany (1998). She has held numerous fellowships, among them a Fulbright Award (1991–1993), and a Konrad-Adenauer-Fellowship funding her dissertation (1994–1997). Professor Grewe came to Columbia University from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. (GHI), where she worked from 1999 to 2003. While being at the GHI, she planned a conference on "Exhibiting the Other: Museums of Mankind and the Politics of Cultural Representation," co-organized by the Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris, France. Subsequently, the questions raised in the conference led to a book project entitled Exhibiting the Other: Museums of Mankind and the Politics of Cultural Representation. Coedited by Cordula Grewe and Uwe Fleckner the book will be published in the GHI series Transatlantische Historische Studien (Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart).

Contact Information
908 Schermerhorn Hall
Telephone: (212) 854-1958
E-mail: cg2101@columbia.edu
Rcent Publications

“Reenchantment as Artistic Practice: Strategies of Emulation in German Romantic Art and Theory.” New German Critique94, special issue: Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter 2005): 36-71

“Beyond Hegel's End of Art: Schadow's ‘Mignon’ and the Religious Project of Late Romanticism, Modern Intellectual History1, Issue 2 (August 2004): 1-33

“Art between Muse and Marketplace,” in: David Wellbery (ed.). A New History of German Literature. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004, 531-535

“The Invention of the Secular Devotional Picture,” Word & Image16, Issue 1 (January-March, 2000): 45-57

Columbia University in the City of New York

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