Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar und Kunstsammlung

Stefanie Lenk

Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer

Academic Profile

Stefanie Lenk studied Art History and Visual Studies, History, Curating, and Medieval Studies in Berlin, Florence, London, and Oxford starting in 2008. From 2013 to 2018, she was a doctoral student in the Empires of Faith research project at the British Museum and the University of Oxford. In 2019, she received her PhD in Art History from the University of Oxford with a dissertation entitled "Baptismal Art and Identity Construction in the Western Mediterranean in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries".

As part of the Empires of Faith research project, Stefanie Lenk worked as a curator at the British Museum from 2016 to 2018. In this context, she curated the international exhibition Imagining the Divine. Art and the Rise of World Religions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. From 2018 to 2020, she taught as a research assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. She coordinated the ERC project Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art under the direction of Beate Fricke until 2020. From 2020 to 2021, she was a fellow at the RomanIslam - Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies at the University of Hamburg. Since 2021, she has been a research assistant at the Chair of Medieval Art History in Göttingen. Her book Roman Identity and Lived Religion. Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity was published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press.

Stefanie Lenk’s new research project, Trusting Images. How to Create Orthodox Imagery Amidst Heresy – The De Altera Vita (c. 1235–36) by Lucas of Tuy, focuses on how clergy and laypeople engaged with images and material culture during the persecution of heretics in the High Middle Ages. The project is funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation. From November 2025 to April 2026, she was a Research Associate at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.

Since 2026, Stefanie Lenk is a member of the Young Academy of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz.



  1. Religious art and architecture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula, in Italy, North Africa, and from a global perspective
  2. Image and heresy in the 12th and 13th centuries in Southern and Central Europe
  3. Reuse and the reception of antiquity
  4. Sculpture and applied arts
  5. University collections of the 19th and 20th centuries
  6. Methods of collaborative and cross-cultural research



  1. 2026 International Conference “Image and Heresy in the Medieval West and the Islamic World,” eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, Basel, together with Martin Schwarz, 29–31 May 2026
  2. 2026 Section “Making and Moving between ‘Worlds’: Craftspeople in the Late Medieval Crowns of Aragon and Castile,” 9th International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, “Small Worlds, Big Worlds: Medieval Mediterranean Perspectives,” Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Universidade Nova, Lisbon, 22–26 June 2026
  3. 2026 Section “Ordering and Remembering” at the conference “Engaged Art History,” Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, 15–16 January 2026
  4. 2025 International Conference “First Images / Inventing Images,” Institute of Art History, University of Stuttgart, together with Anselm Rau, 20–22 November 2025
  5. 2024 Section “Fluidity and Connections in Religious Identity Construction” at the workshop “Networks of Dissent and Persecution in the Middle Ages,” University of Göttingen, Department of Medieval and Modern History, 28 May 2024
  6. 2018 Section “Problems of Reuse: Convenience and Conversion? An Exploration of Collaborative Method in Material Religion,” Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions, together with Robert Bracey and Dominic Dalglish, University of Bern, 18 June 2018
  7. 2015 Section “Iberia and Its Water: The Development of Christian Water Symbolism in Hispania over Time (5th–12th Centuries),” 16th Symposium of the Mediävistenverband, together with Achim Arbeiter and Stefan Trinks, University of Bern, 23–25 March 2015



  1. 2025–2026 Supervision of the student exhibition “Gips statt Elfenbein”, Archaeological Institute, University of Göttingen (29 October 2025 – 31 December 2026), together with Jon Cubas Díaz and Anne-Katrin Sors
  2. 2017–2018 International exhibition “Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions”, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (19 October 2017 – 18 February 2018)
  3. 2016–2018 “Those Who Follow – Arturo Soto”, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford (1 November 2017 – 20 March 2018), together with Dominic Dalglish
  4. 2013 “SUBLIME | Martha Parsey – Marc Fromm”, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, Ettlingen (21 September 2013 – 27 October 2013)
  5. 2012 “Portrait of the Artist As …”, Courtauld Gallery, London (26 June 2012 – 22 July 2012), together with the MA Curating the Art Museum programme, Courtauld Institute


  1. Alessia Cavallo (student assistant at the image archive)
  2. Mariia Denisova (student assistant/third-party funding)
  3. Katharina Kaufmann (Tutor)
  4. Aquinnah Labudda (student assistant at the image archive)
  5. Anna Celina Lange (student assistant at the image archive, Tutor)
  6. Xiaohe Li (Tutor)
  7. Klara Ludwig (student assistant)