Notes on the Contributors

Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transcultural art histories between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. She is currently the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow with the Chair of Visual Culture in the Global Context at the TUD Dresden University of Technology, where she is developing a research project on German-Asian relations in art. She has previously held research and curatorial positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Tate in London, and has had academic positions at Heidelberg University, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and SOAS, University of London. She is currently the Managing Editor of the open-access book series, Worlding Public Cultures published by ICI Berlin Press.

Eva Ehninger is Professor of Modern Art History at the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Since 2024 she co-directs the newly founded Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation (<https://inherit.hu-berlin.de/>). In her scholarship she studies the transfer of heritage into, and by means of, different media, its dissemination in varied historical and cultural contexts, and changes of meaning and value that are based on these transformations. Her current research focuses on conceptions of art and aesthetic education in colonial, postcolonial, national, and transcultural contexts, with a geographical focus on India.

Claire Farago is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, currently living in Los Angeles. She has written extensively on processes of transculturation, the epistemological foundations of art history, art theory, and museums. Her groundbreaking anthology, Reframing the Renaissance (1995), opened the field of transcultural studies in art history. Farago’s latest projects study the relationship between culture and environment. Her monograph Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis is complemented by an anthology co-edited with Susan Lowish and Jens Baumgarten, Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to Be Made, both published in 2025.

Birgit Hopfener is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, cross-appointed with the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. She is an art historian of contemporary art and theory in a global framework with a regional expertise in Chinese art. She is the founding member of Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Cultural Exchange (TrACE) and Worlding Public Cultures. Hopfener authored the book Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen (2013) and co-edited the volumes Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context (2012) and Situating Global Art. Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories (2018).

Franziska Koch is an art historian and Lecturer of Transcultural Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Her habilitation project about Nam June Paik and transcultural collaboration in Fluxus is supported by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. She co-edited Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context (2012) and is the author of Die ‘chinesische Avantgarde’ und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung (2016). More recently, she edited How We Work Together: Ethics, Histories, and Epistemologies of Artistic Collaboration, a themed issue of the Journal of Transcultural Studies (2020/21). She co-leads the Heidelberg team of the Trans-Atlantic Research Project ‘Worlding Public Cultures: the Arts and Social Innovation’ (2019–2023; BMBF/DLR).

Priya Maholay-Jaradi is Convenor for Art History, a collaboration between National University of Singapore (NUS), the National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Art Museum. Jaradi served as assistant curator (South Asia) at the Asian Civilisations Museum (2005–2007). She is the author of Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875–1924), Oxford University Press (2016), and Transcultural Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donation from the Government of India to Malaya, NUS Museum, (2025). Recently, Jaradi has engaged Singapore’s national collections to promote a long, connected, and global art histories’ approach through a massive online course titled Introduction to Art: Singapore in Southeast Asia and the World (forthcoming 2026).

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia, with a focus on historiography and method. His current book project on ‘artistic art histories’ in the region is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. He was the 2022 recipient of the A. L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, presented by the Association for Asian Studies. He is co-founding co-editor of the journal, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (NUS Press).

Varda Nisar (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Department of Art History and a Public Scholar (2022–2023). Her doctoral research focuses on the nexus between cultural production and military regimes in Pakistan and how museums have come to play a critical role in it. Her work diverges in several direction, including art education and community outreach. In 2021, she organized and convened a speaker series titled (Art+Micro)History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South, which drew attention to the specific concerns and artistic modes of resistance in Pakistan. In 2024, she was also the Social Justice Fellow and a Scholar-in-Residence at Centre for Oral History and Storytelling.

Miriam Oesterreich is Professor of Design Theory/Gender Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the international project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation at the University of Heidelberg and remains an associated member. Previously, she was an Athene Young Investigator, post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Research Associate at the Department of Fashion & Aesthetics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. For her second book, she is currently researching the global entanglements of Mexican Indigenism as an avant-garde art practice. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin; her published dissertation analyses the staging of 'exotic' bodies in early pictorial advertising from 1880 to 1914. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula.

maya rae oppenheimer, phd (she/her) works with, through, from, and around paper: she makes it, writes with it, reads from it and sometimes dreams about it. She is the founder and co-director of OK Stamp Press, a mutual aid art publishing project, and teaches in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University <https://okstamppress.ca/>.

Edith-Anne Pageot is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada). She is the author of Le Collège Manitou. Renouveau artistique et médiatique autochtone, with a preface by Guy Sioui Durand (PUM, 2025), and co-editor, with Yves Jubinville, of L'art en partage. Autour du Rapport Rioux (PUM, 2024). She was also part of the team that developed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in French dedicated to Indigenous Art in Canda, based on the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. This course, titled Ohthera’ — L’art contemporain autochtone aujourd’hui (2022), received an honorable mention in the Prix du ministre en enseignement supérieur du Québec. She is currently engaged in a research project which investigates the role and significance of textiles in modern and contemporary art practices in Quebec through a transcultural lens.

Song Xiaoxia is an art historian specializing in Chinese contemporary art. She is Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China, where she also serves as a supervisor for masters and doctoral students. Her research focuses on Chinese art since the 20th century, contemporary art from a global perspective, and the theories and methodologies of art criticism. She is the author and general editor of several publications, including Afterwards: Discourse on the Contemporary Chinese Arts (Chongqing Publishing House) and Reflections: Chinese Modernities as Self-conscious Cultural Ventures (Oxford University Press).

Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. Her current projects include Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms, which critically examines post-Imperial histories of migration in the former French and British Empires, and Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Her research collaborations include Asia Forum, the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, and Worlding Public Cultures, for which she is the co-lead. Tiampo’s previous books and projects include Jin-me Yoon (Art Canada Institute, 2023), Gutai: Splendid Playground (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), and Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011).