Sonya Petersson Substitute senior lecturer, associate professor, research officer
Contact
Name and title: Sonya PeterssonSubstitute senior lecturer, associate professor, research officer
Phone: +468161924
Visiting address Room B 349Frescativägen 22B-26
Postal address Institutionen för kultur och estetik106 91 Stockholm
About me
I am associate professor (docent) of art history and research officer at the Department of culture and aesthetics.
My research is transdisciplinary oriented and situated within the fields of image studies, word and image studies, intermedial studies and media history. Within these areas I have also taken an interest in aesthetic concepts and their historiography. Additionally, I have been engaged in the present digitalisation of visual cultural heritage material.
My teaching includes art history and visual studies on ground- and advanced level. As a teacher, I have mainly been involved in the courses Visual studies, Art history I, Art history II and the Bachelor’s course in art history, in which I teach theory and method and supervise student theses. Additionally, I am director of the Bachelor’s programme in art history.
Ongoing research project
My ongoing research project, Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the 19th-Century Media Culture (2024–27) investigates how a new type of public lectures with projected images, lantern lectures, was established in the broader media culture of the later 19th century in Sweden. The central question is: How can the lantern lectures shed light on the picture’s multimodal history of knowledge? In three case studies, the project investigates how the lantern lectures, in image and text, 1) were historically situated between the arts and the sciences, 2) mediated the popular subject of travels around the world together with the illustrated press and 3) mediated art history along with print reproductions of artworks.
Previous research
During 2020, I was enrolled in the Metadata Culture research group.
My three-year postdoctoral project Graphic Illustration: Image and Text from the Point of View of Mechanical Reproduction (2016–19) studied what significance the new 19th-century technologies of reproduction had for the illustration as pictorial genre. The project was based on historiographic studies of the modern (post 1800) concept of illustration and intermedial studies of 19th-century illustrated literature in a broad sense, including both illustrated press and fiction.
In my doctoral dissertation, Konst i omlopp: Mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft (2014), I examined how 18th-century concepts of art circulated and transformed on the cultural market of the time. This included three case studies about 1) concepts of art in papers and pamphlets in the light of 2) the new public art exhibitions and 3) the print market. The thesis constitutes a critique of the historiography of the birth and establishment of the autonomous concept of art.