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Yuka Kadoi is an art historian, art historiographer, museologist and cultural theorist. Since 2019, she has been working as senior scientist with the Lise Meitner Award (FWF) and the Elise Richter Award (FWF) at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on socio-cultural mobility and materiality, especially the art and material culture of the Persian cultural world after the 7th century or broadly the heritage of itinerant people.

Project title: PERSICA CENTROPA: COSMOPOLITAN ARTEFACTS IN THE AGE OF TRANSITION (1900-1950)
This project seeks to redefine what used to be called ‘Persian art’—cultural artefacts that became predominantly associated with medieval and early-modern Iran and West Central Asia—while reframing it as an alternative narrative of aesthetic thinking that evolved in Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Spanning from the declining years of the Habsburg empire to the emergence of new nation states within its former territories after 1918 and the devastation of World War II, it maps out the network of collecting and interpreting Persian objects and images against a backdrop of the socio-political upheaval of a once-thriving cosmopolitan cultural region.

What do I want to achieve?
Apart from the publication of my long-pending second monograph, this project will become a key milestone in my career development.

Why did I become a scientist?
My unusual educational and professional background has taken me to a circuitous academic path. However, this has also given me such an invaluable opportunity to experiment with new ideas to implement new methodologies, in order to shape my own field. I am a so-called scientific art historian, luckily being able to undertake research activities in one of the few countries in the world where Art History is highly regarded as a science.