Sven Dupré holds new chair in History of Art, Science and Technology

As of 1 September Prof. Sven Dupré is appointed Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. This new chair focuses on the production and consumption of art and its embedding in the history of knowledge. Special attention will be paid to the history of the study of art materials and technologies.

Dupré's appointment contributes to strengthening the Utrecht art historical research and the Descartes Centre for the for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. The new chair will be installed at the Department of History and Art History.

Sven Dupré is currently Professor of History of Knowledge at the Institute for Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. In March 2015 the European Research Council awarded him an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project ‘ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950: Concepts, Practices, Expertise’, which he will carry out at Utrecht University. In Spring 2015 he is the Robert H. Smith Scholar in Residence for Renaissance Sculpture in Context at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His recent publications include Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century (Springer, 2014) and Art and Alchemy: The Mystery of Transformation (Hirmer, 2014) in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.

National and international collaboration

Sven Dupré will contribute to Utrecht University's art history education programmes, including the two-year Research Master's programme Art History of the Low Countries in its European Context. In addition, as chair holder he will be actively involved in research initiatives at the Ateliergebouw in Amsterdam, where the Rijksmuseum, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and the University of Amsterdam combine their knowledge in the field of restoration and preservation of art objects. Moreover, the chair plays a major part in the research programme 'Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World, 1450-1800', which is jointly executed by the Descartes Centre and the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin (research group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe).