German Visual Culture

This series invites research on all aspects of German visual culture – including art, architecture, film and media – across different periods, geographical locations, and political contexts. Books in the series engage with aesthetic and ideological continuities as well as ruptures and divergences between individual creators, movements, educational systems, art institutions, and cultures of display. Challenging scholarship that interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field is desirable.
A guiding question of the series is the impact of German visual culture on critical and public spheres, both inside and outside the German-speaking world. Reception is thus conceived in the broadest possible terms, including both the ways in which visual culture has been perceived and defined as well as the ways in which modern and contemporary German creators have undertaken visual dialogues with their predecessors or contemporaries. The series welcomes cross-disciplinary approaches from art history, anthropology, material culture; the histories of science, perception, medicine, and technology; and the history of ideas. Issues of cultural transfer, critical race theory and related postcolonial analysis, feminism, queer theory, and other interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, as are studies on production and consumption, the art market, pioneering publishing houses, and the mass media, including film and illustrated magazines.
All proposals for monographs and edited collections in the history of German visual culture will be considered. Contributions in English and German are welcome. Submissions are subject to rigorous peer review.
This series was previously edited by Professor Christian Weikop, from 2018 to 2025, during which time he connected his Research Forum for German Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh with the series.