Fellow Lecture by Dr. Kia Vahland (Fellow of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald / Süddeutsche Zeitung)

What has to happen for an image to be reproduced many times, find an international audience and set political and social impulses? What role do political images - from paintings and press photographs to social media postings - play in wars and crises in the 20th and 21st centuries? Exceptional works can bring a historical situation to the point and shape the media-political reception. The art historian, political scientist and journalist Dr. Kia Vahland uses well-known examples to show how iconic images become symbols of emotional states in which political and personal experiences intertwine.

Kia Vahland studied art history and political science in Rome, Hamburg and Dijon. She teaches at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and is an editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where she was head of visual arts in the features section from 2008 to 2017 and co-founded the opinion section in 2018. Her work has been awarded the Michael Althen Prize for Criticism by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. She is the author of numerous books, including the biography "Leonardo da Vinci und die Frauen" (Insel Verlag, Berlin 2019), which has been translated several times and was nominated for the Leipzig Non-Fiction Prize. In the summer semester 2025, Kia Vahland is a Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.

Moderation: Professor Dr. Kilian Heck