Stefanie Lenk

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 project, "Trusting Images. How to Create Orthodox Imagery Amidst Heresy – The De Altera Vita (c. 1235–36) by Lucas of Tuy", focuses on the use of images during the period of high medieval persecution of heretics. Trusting Images is funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation.