Mirjam Wenzel

Professor Mirjam Wenzel studied general and comparative literature, political science, and theater studies in Berlin and Tel Aviv. Afterward she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of German Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and earned her doctorate with a dissertation on the Holocaust discourse in Germany in the 1960s.

Mirjam Wenzel is the author and co-editor of various books and exhibition catalogs on German-Jewish art and cultural history. Her publications include essays, articles, and blog entries on questions of cultural theory, aesthetics, and museology, on representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts, photography, and film, on critical theory, and particularly on the life and works of Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. She also works as a curator and has developed several international exhibitions.

From 2007 to 2015, Mirjam Wenzel directed the media department of the Jewish Museum Berlin, where she was responsible for the presentation of Jewish history and culture in digital and print media. She has been recognized as an international expert on the digital transformation of museums ever since. She has directed the Jewish Museum Frankfurt – Germany’s oldest Jewish museum – since 2016 and has been an honorary professor at the Department of Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2019. She will serve as a visiting professor at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for the 2020/21 winter semester.