Art historian Galit Noga-Banai receives the Rosenzweig Professorship in Kassel

Galit Noga-Banai is a professor at the Institute of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After studying art history at the Hebrew University, she obtained her doctorate there and completed her dissertation entitled "Silver Liturgical Caskets from the Early Christian Period" in 2003. During her postdoctoral period she worked at the Museum of Late Antique and Byzantine Art in Berlin.

Her academic career includes guest lectureships at various German universities. In 2005, she was a lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies with the seminar topic "Jerusalem, Rome, Ravenna - Local Iconography in Transition." From October to December 2012, she researched and taught at the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg. Her publications include the books "The Trophies of the Martyrs: An Art Historical Study of Early Christian Silver Reliquaries" and "Scared Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome", published by Oxford University Press in 2008 and 2018 respectively. More recently, she has also explored modern commemoration in Germany from a medievalist perspective. The result was her book "A Medievalist's Gaze. Christian Visual Rhetoric in Modern German Memorials (1950-2000)" was recently published by Peter Lang (2022). She has also recently written several guest articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"I'm looking forward to my time in Kassel and the exchange with the students. I am currently researching pre-modern visual rhetoric in German war cemeteries of the 20th century. As the archive of the German War Graves Commission is located in Niestetal, I hope to gain interesting insights for my research during my stay," says Noga-Banai.

As part of her professorship, Galit Noga-Banai will be offering a seminar entitled "Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Europe" for students at the University of Kassel and the School of Art and Design in Kassel.

Background:

With the visiting professorship, the University of Kassel is commemorating the work and legacy of the Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who was born in Kassel. It has been awarded by the University of Kassel every summer semester since 1987 and serves to bring to mind the culture of European Jewry, which was largely destroyed by National Socialism, and to engage with the Jewish present.