Freya Schwachenwald

Freya Schwachenwald is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Art History at Technische Universität Berlin and 2024 Fellow of the Krupp Foundation at the Department of History, Stanford. Her research focuses on German imperialist ambitions, imaginaries and entanglements in the works of German-speaking artists traveling to East Asia in the mid-19th century. Her dissertation investigates the negotiations of nation, art and nature in images, texts and objects, including travelogues, military documents, maps, prints, paintings, as well as objects collected during the journeys. Taking a critical, transcultural approach, her research searches to unsettle the narratives of nation, artistic taste and knowledge by focusing on marginalised voices and subjectivities, as well as fractures, contradictions and ambivalences in the archival material. Freya received a French-German B.A. from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Université Lumière Lyon 2, and a M.A. in Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University. Since 2020, she is Fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Her writings have been published in the Journal of Transcultural Studies and Global Histories.