Barbara Baert

Biography

In 2006 Barbara Baert got appointed within the senior academic staff of the University of Leuven. In the same year she founded the Iconology Research Group (IRG), an organisation with links to ten institutions that support, disseminate and internationalise research on iconology. Also in 2006, she again received a prize from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium, Class of Fine Arts, for her impressive career under the age of forty.

In 2015 she was appointed Full Professor. News of this most recent promotion reached her during a Senior Fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) of the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar (April-September 2015), where she had been invited as an excellence-expert on iconology.

In 2016 she received the Francqui Prize Human Sciences <www.francquifoundation.be> for her outstanding interdisciplinary achievements in the Bildwissenschaften in particular and for her international impact on the Human Sciences in general. This prize is under auspices of King Philippe and was awarded to her in person on 8 June 2016. As the jury report proclaims: “Her truly innovative approach to the iconology of Mediaeval Art, which has placed into the foreground the senses, materiality, and various aspects of the female and male body, and iconographic themes that have been neglected in the past, has deeply transformed the way European religious and secular art of the Middle Ages is viewed.”
(www.francquifoundation.be)

In November 2017 she she was knighted in recognition of her public service as Commandeur in the Belgian Order of Leopold.

In 2019 she was selected as member/fellow at the IAS Bologna and the IAS Princeton.
In 2021 Barbara Baert was holder of the James Loeb Lecture at ZIKG in München: https://www.zikg.eu/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2021/online-james-loeb-lecture-2021-barbara-baert
In 2023 Barbara Baert was holder of the Aby Warburg Professur in Hamburg, in invitation by the Aby Warburg-Stiftung http://www.warburg-haus.de/das-warburg-haus-heute/
http://www.warburg-haus.de/aby-warburg-stiftung/
In 2024 Barbara Baert was holder of the Dahlem Humanities Center Lectures, Freie Universität Berlin, Dahlem Humanities Center Lectures • Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC) • Freie Universität Berlin (fu-berlin.de)
In 2024 Barbara Baert was fellow at the Centre André Chastel - Université de Sorbonne in Paris. https://www.centrechastel.sorbonne-universite.fr/membres/chercheurs-et-chercheuses-invitees
Données - CAC - PLEMO3D - RegardCrosie_BBAERT_04032024.mp4 (sorbonne-universite.fr)
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Baert’s projects show a determined interdisciplinary dialogue within the humanities and can be regarded from three main angles: the methodological space between text and image, the impact of the sensorium in the visual arts, and finally critical reflection upon her own discipline.
From the first angle, Barbara Baert has conducted much work into the body as medium in text and image. Her research into the issue of ‘touch’ in the iconography of biblical women (Mary Magdalene; the woman with an issue of blood) has contributed to a better understanding of gendered taboos of touch and blood. An important concern in this group of publications on corporality is the role of relics, on the one hand, and, of textiles as a second skin on the other. In these projects she works comparatively across the cultural boundaries of Europe.
Her familiarity with research questions on the impact of touch, on textiles, and on the body’s liminal zones has secondly led to projects on the human senses. The latest challenges in Barbara Baert’s work are the representation and experience of the senses that escape the visual medium, such as scent and wind, and can only be visualised indirectly. Her most recent book on these themes is Pneuma and the Visual Arts in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. Essays on Wind, Ruach, Incarnation, Odour Stains, Movement, Kairos, Web and Silence. This deals with the complex relationships between the human person and their ecological environment, the person and their body, the spiritual relationship between visible and invisible in the visual arts. Baert proposes the phenomenon of ‘wind’ as a paradigm for research into the image as such.
The third approach in Barbara Baert’s oeuvre is critical reflection on the foundations and the future of her discipline. This preoccupation has taken shape in a series of reflective essays on the discipline within the purpose-made series Studies in Iconology (Peeters Publishers). This series shows a bold and perceptive researcher, protecting her intellectual sanctuary and by analogy cherishing a discourse that dares to interrogate the academic genre itself. She defends an academic practice of ‘fluidity’ and empathy rather than one of boundaries and a fixation on the ‘self’.