Who Are We
Who are we?
Founded and directed by Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother—who formerly held the position of Senior Provenance Specialist at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and now holds a prestigious Lichtenberg-Professorship—the Provenance Lab is home to a small but growing team of art historians and digital humanities specialists dedicated to questions of provenance: Dr. Max Koss, Fabio Mariani MA, Liza Weber MA.
Where are we?
You will find us at Leuphana University Lüneburg, one of Germany’s leading institutions for transdisciplinary cultural sciences. The architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the university’s central building, once described Leuphana as “an incubator for new ideas, innovation, research and discovery.” Indeed, it is unique in the humanities insofar as its teaching and scholarship are experimental in nature.
Who is funding us?
The professorship, the lab, and our project, ‘Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museums’, are jointly funded by Leuphana University and the Volkswagen Foundation’s Lichtenberg Program. The Volkswagen Foundation, or VolkswagenStiftung as it is known in Germany, is one of the country’s leading independent funding bodies for academia.
What are Lichtenberg-Professorships?
Named after the 18th-century Göttingen University scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—who held the first professorship explicitly devoted to experimental physics in Germany—the Volkswagen Foundation’s Lichtenberg Program aims to establish innovative academic teaching and new lines of research by awarding tenured professorships and additional funding to outstanding young researchers from all disciplines at a university of their choice.
What do we believe in?
At the core of our lab lies a new way of thinking about provenance, which is informed by the possibilities of data science. Fundamentally, we understand provenance beyond individual object biographies. We believe that by reading it more broadly as a collection of empirical evidence of cultural phenomena, we can study temporal, spatial, social, and conceptual trends and network dimensions. In so doing, we hope to gain new insights into the circulation of art, thereby enriching art history.