ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP
In May 2024, the Gerda Henkel Foundation pledged funding to support one or two Fellowships in the 2025–26 academic year and in the 2026–27 academic year as well—for a total up to €220,000.
The Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellowships are open to mid- and senior-level European scholars who wish to propose an advanced research project in the History of Art. Applicants must have a PhD.
More details and deadlines are on the Fellowship Program page, along with news on the Academy opportunities in other fields.
Read an interview here with Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow Stefano de Bosio who was at the Italian Academy in autumn 2025.
Italian Academy: What are your main areas of research and what have you been working on in recent years?
ABOUT THE FOUNDATION
More information about the Gerda Henkel Foundation can be found here.
Gerda Henkel Fellows
University of Bergamo (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Kettle of fish: toward an art history of homoerotic imagery in the HIV/AIDS crisis
2026–2027: Spring
Stefano Mudu holds a PhD in visual culture from IUAV University of Venice. His research focuses on strategies of enactment and re-enactment in contemporary artistic production, practices of iconographic reactivation in visual culture, and the possibility of rethinking art history through the lenses of queer theory, feminism, colonialism, and pressing ecological concerns. His current work examines the role of visuality during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
He has worked as a curatorial researcher for major international exhibitions and institutions, including the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani, and “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum, New York.He is the author of the monographs Spazi Critici. I luoghi della scrittura contemporanea (2018) and Enactments: Reactivation Strategies in Contemporary Art Practices (2026). Alongside several academic essays, he regularly contributes to publications in the field.
Free University of Berlin (Germany)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Like butterfly wings: image doubling in Early Modern displays and visual culture
2025–2026: Fall
Stefano de Bosio teaches Art History at Freie Universität Berlin – FUBiS and is the founder of the international scholarly network "Logic of the Negative: Techniques and Metaphors of Imprinting". His research investigates the visual and conceptual dynamics of orientation in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on image reversal and broader patterns of cultural transmission across Europe.
He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Turin and holds a postgraduate diploma in Cultural Heritage from the University of Bologna. His first book, Frontiere. Arte, luogo, identità ad Aosta e nell'arco alpino occidentale (Officina Libraria, 2021), which was awarded the Premio Giovanni Testori for Art Criticism, examines the role of the Western Alps as a contact zone around 1500. His current book project, Patterns of Reversal, explores the perceptual and cultural impact of image reversal in early modern art.
His work has been supported by fellowships from the DFK – German Center for Art History in Paris; the IKKM – International Research Institute for Media Philosophy in Weimar; Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut; and Imaginaries of Force, the University of Hamburg’s Center of Advanced Studies.
At the Italian Academy, Stefano de Bosio will pursue research on the cultural, perceptual, and theoretical implications of image doubling—through mirroring, replications, and counterproofing—in the display and circulation of drawings, prints, and paintings in early modern Europe.Read here: an interview done with Stefano de Bosio after his Fellowship in autumn 2025.
Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Borderland modernities in the Adriatic: women, art and institutions from the Habsburgs to the Italian Fascists, 1900–1939
2026–2027: Spring
Ana is an art historian and curator specializing in early twentieth-century European avant-garde and modernist art. She studied art history and English language and literature at the University of Rijeka, where she completed both her BA and MA degrees. In 2022, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with a thesis titled “D’Annunzio’s Futurists: Fiume from 1914 to 1934”, supported by a Courtauld Scholarship and a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England award. During and after her doctorate, she combined research, teaching, and curatorial work, holding teaching posts at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Northwestern Polytechnic in Canada. From 2023, she worked as Senior Research Officer at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London, where she continues as a consultant and recently curated the exhibition “Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl” (2026). Until December 2026, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), where she was working on her first book, From Habsburg Corpus Separatum to Imperial Afterlives: Visual Politics and Art in Fiume. Her research has appeared in journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, including International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Peristil, and Immediations.
Her time at the Italian Academy will be dedicated to developing a new research project on women artists and their position within art institutions and spaces in the port cities of Fiume (Rijeka), Capodistria (Koper), and Trieste during the first half of the twentieth century, as these towns moved through the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, geopolitical ambiguity, paramilitary occupation, and the formation of new nation-states.University of Turin (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
In others’ hands: retouching and manipulating works on paper in Early Modern Europe
2026–2027: Fall
Alice Ottazzi is an art historian specialized in the history of drawing and printmaking in the Early Modern period. Her scholarship explores the artistic and epistemological agency of graphic arts and connects it with art theory, material studies, and the history of ideas and knowledge. In her work, she examines the circulation of objects, people, and ideas with a particular focus on Great Britain, France, and Italy. She is interested in how the mechanisms of mobility, migration, trading, collecting, and reception shaped the visual and material entanglements of artistic production, the afterlives of works of art, and art theory.
She received her PhD in art history from the University of Turin and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, and her thesis won the Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis (2020). She was post-doctoral fellow at University Paris Nanterre (2022–2024), at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2024) and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Planck-Institut of Florence (2025). She also taught at the universities of Aix–Marseille, Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne and Franche–Comté, and she has been collaborating with the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome).
Her book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo was published in 2024 (Polistampa) with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation.