Cátedra del Prado Colloquium.
The Museum’s Times

Bénédicte Savoy is professor for Modern Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin. Between 2016 and 2021 she also held a professorship at the Collège de France in Paris, where she taught the cultural history of artistic heritage in Europe from the 18th century to the 20th century. Her research focuses on museum history, Franco-German cultural transfer, Nazi looted art, and research on postcolonial provenance. In 2018 she wrote the report On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage together with Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr. This report was commissioned by Emmanuel Macron, President of France.

She has received numerous awards for her research, academic activities, and teaching, including the 2016 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation and, most recently, the Berlin Science Prize. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Knight of the French Legion of Honor and a member of various other institutions, advisory boards, and committees. Her most recent publications include the book Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, which has been translated into several languages, and the joint publication Atlas der Abwesenheit. Kameruns Kulturerbe in Deutschland (Atlas of Absence. Cameroon’s Cultural Heritage in Germany).

Sebastian Willert is a Research Associate at Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur - Simon Dubnow in Leipzig Leibniz. He received his Ph.D. from the Technische Universität Berlin in February 2022. His dissertation Kulturbesitz. Konflikte um archäologische Objekte in der deutsch-osmanischen Politik, 1898–1918 (Cultural Property. Conflicts around archaeological objects in German-Ottoman Politics, 1898–1918) was published by Wallstein Verlag in May 2024. Between 2017 and 2020, he participated in the Ph.D. program Ancient Object(s) and Visual Studies (AOViS) at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies (BerGSAS) and was a Predoctoral-Fellow in the Research Cluster Translocations. Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets at the Chair for Modern Art History at Technische Universität Berlin. Sebastian was affiliated with Boğaziçi University’s Department of History in Istanbul and was a Ph.D.-Fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. In 2022, he was a Fellow of the Leibniz Research Alliance Value of the Past at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. Since the Fall of 2022, he has been teaching Ancient Art in Berlin: Discovering the Collections of Museum Island at NYU Berlin, focusing on the provenance and translocation histories of archaeological objects to Berlin’s museum collections.

Matilde Cartolari is a research associate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. She has previously worked at the Technische Universität of Berlin, where she completed her PhD in 2022, and at the University of Vienna. She has been awarded scholarships by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (2018-2021), the DAAD (at the Warburg Institute, 2019), and the Getty Research Institute (2024). Between 2017 and 2020, she took part in the international research cluster Translocations. Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets at TU Berlin, where she coordinates the provenance research blog The Lives of Pictures in cooperation with the Berlin State Museums since 2022. Her research focuses on the interplay between exhibitions, conservation, and the art market in early 20th century Europe and the USA.

Iñigo Salto Santamaría is a research and teaching associate at the Department of Modern Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he defended his dissertation, Ephemeral Museums of Medieval Art, in January 2024. He previously studied art history, museology and Byzantine archaeology at Universität Heidelberg and the École du Louvre. His research focuses on the modern display and provenance of medieval art from a transnational perspective, which has been supported by fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Paris (2019) and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (2020-2024), as well as a Graduate Internship at the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute (2019-2020). He currently serves as the deputy chair of the Richard Schöne Society for Museum History in Berlin.