Michèle Seehafer recently received her PhD in Art History from the University of Bern. In her dissertation entitled Room, Materiality, Power: Spatial Conceptions at the Court in Copenhagen during the Seventeenth Century she investigates unique courtly collection rooms with a specific emphasize on material and materiality while also focusing on visual culture, technology, global trade, as well as strategies of political representation and self-formation.

Between 2016 and 2020 she was a member of the interdisciplinary research project Materialized Identities: Objects, Affects and Effect, 1450–1750 where she was part of the subproject Mutable Matter: Netherlandish Painters on Values, Uses and Effects of Gold directed by Professor Christine Göttler. Within this framework, she especially looked at the shimmering painters’ material of shell gold and its multifaceted meanings in the miniatures of Joris Hoefnagel.

She currently works at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich as a Curator’s Assistant where she helps preparing an exhibition on the Baroque