Michaela Giebelhausen

My research interests sit in several areas: museum architecture and histories; exhibition histories; Victorian art; eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries art and architecture; history of photography.

I am interested in museums as sites for the construction of cultural narratives that are being formed through the architecture of the museum and the organisation of the displays. I am currently working on a monograph on museums and temporality. Previous publications include the edited collection, The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (MUP 2003), essays in Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies (Blackwell Publishing, 2006) and Marstine (ed.), New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

My research on exhibition histories includes the recent Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions (co-edited with N. Adamou, Routledge 2023). This interdisciplinary project has a global reach and considers the theme of exhibitions as political resistance as well as cultural critique from global perspectives. My work on exhibition histories also includes the essay, ‘Footholds in the ‘northern wilderness’: Exhibiting Scandinavian and Nordic Art, 1912-2023’ (Mercatorfonts 2024), which considers the writing in and out of Nordic art from Modernism’s established narratives.

In 2019, I co-curated with Dr Alison Green (UAL) the immersive video installation Madame B by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker at the Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins. The artwork explores the link between capitalism and romance through a reworking of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857).

I have published widely on the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, including my monograph Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in mid-Victorian Britain, which considered the reframing of religious subject matter for the art market and the formation of the PRB as a Victorian avant-garde movement as well as analysing how a new image of Christ could be constructed deemed fit for the Victorian age. Further publications include – Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (co-edited with Tim Barringer, Ashgate 2009) and the essay 'The religious and intellectual background', in Prettejohn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (CUP 2012).

Current research projects include the art of the eighteenth-century painter George Stubbs and notions of naturalism as artifice at the core of Georgian culture and cultural politics.

I joined the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies in 2023 as Assistant Professor of Art History and Curatorial Practice. I have previously taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art; was Course Leader of BA Culture, Criticism and Curating at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2014-2020); Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and History of Art at the University of Essex; and Director of the Centre of Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex (1994-2014). I studied Art History, Modern History and English Literature at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt before coming to the UK to study for my DPhil/PhD at the University of Oxford, which formed the basis for my monograph Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Ashgate 2006).