Isabel Wünsche is Professor of Art and Art History at Jacobs University Bremen since 2001. Previously, she taught modern art at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; Scripps College, Claremont; and the University of California, Los Angeles. She also worked on museum projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.
Dr. Wünsche studied Art History and Classical and Christian Archaeology in Berlin, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Los Angeles and received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. She held research fellowships at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino (2003-2004), the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University (2003-2004 and 2007), the National Humanities Center, North Carolina (2007-2008), the Collegium Budapest (2008-2009), and the New Europe College, Institute of Advanced Study, Bucharest (2016) and received grants from the German Science Foundation (DFG, 2011-2012), the German Academic Exchange Board (DAAD, 2012-2013, 2014-2015, 2019-2020), the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM, 2013, 2015, 2017), and the Australian Research Council (ARC, 2016-2019).
Her research and teaching interests are 19th and 20th century art and art theory, in particular European modernism and the avant-garde movements and their reception beyond Europe, as well as art and science interrelations, abstract art, synaesthesia, and new forms of visualization. Her book publications include Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence 1924-1945 (German and English editions, Berne: Benteli, 2006), Kursschwankungen: Russische Kunst im Wertesystem der europäischen Moderne (with Ada Raev, Berlin: Lukas, 2007), Harmonie und Synthese. Die russische Moderne zwischen universellem Anspruch und nationaler kultureller Identität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), Biocentrism and Modernism (with Oliver A. I. Botar, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), Kunst & Leben. Michail Matjuschin und die russischen Avantgarde in St. Petersburg (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (with Paul Crowther, London: Routledge, 2012), The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nature’s Creative Principles (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle (with Tanja Malycheva, Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation (with Wiebke Gronemeyer, Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context (London: Routledge, 2018), and BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education in Art, Architecture and Design (with Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019).