Art historian from the University of Jena is the new Vice President of the DFG

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Johannes Grave in the Custody’s Depot of Paintings. Image: Jens Meyer (Uni
Johannes Grave in the Custody’s Depot of Paintings. Image: Jens Meyer (University of Jena)

Johannes Grave from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena has been elected Vice President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) on 28 June 2023. In total, the DFG Executive Committee currently includes nine vice presidents - including Axel Brakhage, another Jena resident. Graves’ four-year term at Germany’s renowned research funding organisation begins on 1 January 2024. The art historian will represent the perspective of the cultural sciences and humanities on the DFG’s Executive Committee. Grave’s special interests include the cultivation of multilingualism in today’s scientific landscape and the role of collections and museums in research.

The newly elected Vice-President Johannes Grave holds the professorship for Modern Art History at the University of Jena. His research focuses on European Romanticism, Italian and French painting and image theory. His research topics include the examination of buildings in paintings of the Quattrocento as well as the oeuvre of the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini or the work of Caspar David Friedrich. He is currently working as co-curator on the preparation of the major anniversary exhibition "Caspar David Friedrich. Art for a New Age" at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Grave has been associated with the DFG since 2018 as a member of the Senate and Grants Committee for the Collaborative Research Centres (CRC). Previously, he was also involved as deputy speaker of the Bielefeld CRC "Practices of Comparison". He is also one of the founding members of the Centre for Classical Research in Weimar and has been Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar since 2021. In 2020, Grave received the DFG’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. This year he was elected a full member of the Academia Europaea.