Andrea Meyer has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin since 2003. She studied art history, theater studies, and North American studies in Bochum, Berlin, and New York. As a predoctoral researcher, she worked in the research project “German-French Art Communication 1870–1840” at the Freie Universität Berlin and the German Center for Art History in Paris. In 2007, she completed her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the German reception of Jean-François Millet. She was a guest lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences at Istanbul Teknik Universitesi and taught at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M. (in the Curatorial Studies – Theory – History of Critique degree program) and at New York University in Berlin. At the Technische Universität Berlin, she coordinated the art studies / museum profile for the Art Studies master’s degree program in collaboration with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (SMB).
Alongside the visual arts, her main field of research is the history of museums. In her previous projects she examined the actors, media, and institutions that helped to modernize museum practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current research about how the professional field is opening up to scholars takes up her critical reflections on museum reform processes. In the international research project “Translocations: Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets,” she worked on the iconography and reception of collections from colonial contexts. She advocates for research-based, practical teaching in close collaboration with various Berlin museums, e.g., the Brücke-Museum, the Bröhan-Museum, and the Art Library of the SMB.
Publications
Andrea Meyer, Kämpfe um die Professionalisierung des Museums: Karl Koetschau, die Museumskunde und der Deutsche Museumsbund 1905–1939 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021).
Andrea Meyer, “Der Deutsche Museumsbund als Antwort auf die Verflechtung von Museum und Markt,” Museumskunde 83, no. 1 (2018), 68–73.
Andrea Meyer, “Museums in Print: The Interplay of Text and Images in the Journal Museumskunde,” in Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, ed. by Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 93–110.
Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy (ed.), The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014).
Andrea Meyer et al. (eds.), Museumsgeschichte: Kommentierte Quellentexte 1750–1950 (Berlin: Reimer, 2010).