
Katrin Nahidi
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
In the spring semester of 2025, Katrin Nahidi will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Art and Musicology at the University of Graz in Austria, she is currently working on her habilitation project with the working title "Visualizing Petroscapes: Art and Oil in the Caspian Sea Region," which analyzes the fundamental role of oil in shaping artistic modernity at the dawn of decarbonization.
Katrin Nahidi received her PhD from Free University Berlin in 2021 with a dissertation entitled "Modernism Revisited: Exhibitions, Cultural Politics, and Modernist Art Production in Iran." Her dissertation was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the Sinergia project "Other Modernities - Practices and Patrimony of Visual Expression Outside the West," at the University of Bern and the Free University Berlin (2013-2017).
In 2023, her monograph, "The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran: Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production," was published by Cambridge University Press.
Her research interests include global art, modern art historiography, non-Western modern and contemporary art production, art theory from the Global South, and postcolonial art history. She has taught at the University of Graz, the University of Osnabrück, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her articles on Iranian modernism have been published in academic journals, including kritische berichte, Stedelijk Studies, and Artl@s Bulletin.
Educational Background
- PhD: Art History, Free University Berlin, 2021