Isabella Woldt

Universität Hamburg

Memory and image archiving: the logic of visual memory in Aby Warburg

2013-2014: Spring

Isabella Woldt is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History of Art at Universität Hamburg. Her studies focus on the epistemology of visual elements, particularly in the works of Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer. She examines the psychological, anthropological, and philosophical foundations of Warburg's theory of visual memory, expressed and presented in his picture series. At the same time, she investigates connections between the humanities and the natural sciences, especially concerning the process of remembering, in light of recent findings on the function of image memory in empirical studies. 

She is co-editor of the collected works of Aby Warburg and has collaboratively published his "Picture Series and Exhibitions" in 2012. She is editing the documentation of Warburg's journey to the U.S (1895-1896), his 1923 Kreuzlingen-Lecture, and his photographic and ethnographic collections. Another main research area is also Baroque art and architecture in Central and East-Central Europe, aristocratic estates, residential cities, and the unique culture of Sarmatism. She received the Aby Warburg Prize (Warburg-Stipend) from the Hamburg Senate in 2008, and a research fellowship at the German Forum for Art History in Paris in 2012. At the Academy she will intensify her research on Warburg and Cassirer and extend it to an investigation of logic in the process of visual creativity and memory.