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.
Two winners have been selected for the 2025-26 academic year: Stefano de Bosio for the Fall 2025 term and Virginia Magnaghi for the Spring 2026 term. Please check back on this page soon for more details about the new Fellows.
ABOUT THE FOUNDATION
More information about the Gerda Henkel Foundation can be found here.
Gerda Henkel Fellows
University of Trento (Italy)
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
“Libyan itineraries” in the 1930s: the legacy of landscape in visual and written narratives of the Italian “fourth shore”
2025–2026: Spring
Virginia Magnaghi is an art historian whose interests lie primarily in the history of Italian modern art, with a particular focus on the history of Fascist visual and written culture.
She received her PhD in 2024 from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, where she defended a dissertation on the visual and written representations of the Italian natural landscape between the two wars. This is also the subject of her current book-length project.
She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento (2024–25). During her doctoral studies she was a research fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York (2021) and at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH, Stockholm (2022). In the fall of 2025, she will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome.
In addition to exploring the dialogue between visual and literary studies, she is interested in their possible intersections with the formation of national identity, and in the topics of ecocriticism and difficult heritage. She works as a critic and writer on contemporary dance and theater for the magazines Stratagemmi and La Falena. Her academic work has been published in international journals such as Studiolo, Modernism/Modernity, and L’Uomo Nero.
The Italian Academy at Columbia University will support her new project dedicated to how Italians represented Libya, and in particular its landscape, both natural and built, during the 1930s. This project is rooted in the idea of further exploring landscape as a key methodological tool when addressing the intersecting issues of representation, identity and its negotiation, colonialism and racism.
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.