Juergen Heinrichs, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Art History Program
Department of Communication Media and the Arts

I joined Seton Hall University in 1997 after spending a year as a Visiting Instructor at Swarthmore College. I received my Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998. At Seton Hall, I have taught a range of courses in art history and museum studies as well as a graduate museum seminar abroad in Berlin, Germany.  

My research falls into four thematic areas. First, I study encounters between African American and German culture from the early 20th century to the present. Departing from the highly successful reception of jazz and the Charleston in Weimar Germany, I probe what such intermedia (between art, music and dance) and cross-cultural (between African American and German culture) translations reveal about the possibilities and limitations of meaningful cultural contact. Second, I chart the “fallout” of climate change in visual culture, a project that recently led me to examine the role of public buses as metaphors of social change in American culture or study a series of artworks that reflect how automobile corporations changed their self-representations through (landscape) architecture and promotional materials. Third, my interest in intersections between art and science prompted me to study the cultural history of astronomical phenomena or probe the interrelationships between art and medical imaging. Fourth, I study the “afterlife” of mythology in popular culture in various case studies that highlight the idealization and subsequent dismantling of public figures, pop stars or ordinary people in ways that evoke major narratives of Greco-Roman mythology.