Mathias Danbolt is a professor of art history at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Over the past decade, his research has focused on the intersections between art history and colonial history in a Nordic context, with particular emphasis on memory politics, monuments, and art in public spaces. Danbolt has led several collaborative research projects examining the contemporary effects of colonial history and politics, including Okta: Art and Communities in Friction in Sápmi (2019–2022), The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories (2019–2024), and Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (2022–2025). His latest publication is the anthology Searvedoaibma: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2024), co-edited with Britt Kramvig and Christina Hætta.
Photograph: Knut Åserud
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Merike Kurisoo, an Estonian art historian, is the Director of both the Niguliste Museum and the Adamson-Eric Museum, branches of the Art Museum of Estonia. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern ecclesiastical art, particularly the transition from Catholicism to Lutheranism in Estonia. Kurisoo has authored several books and numerous scholarly articles, emphasizing art relations in the Baltic Sea region and Nordic countries. She has curated several exhibitions in collaboration with museums from Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Sweden.
Her interests also include the mobility of artists and art geography within the Baltic Sea region in medieval and early modern period. She leads the international research project "Michel Sittow in the North," highlighting Tallinn's role as an art mediator. This project featured exhibitions in Estonia and Sweden in 2023, along with a seminar in 2022 that focused on artistic connections between Estonia and Finland during the long Middle Ages.
Kurisoo is the Chair of the Estonian Society of Art Historians and Curators, as well as the Research Board of the Art Museum of Estonia. She also serves on the board of the Nordic Iconography Society and is part of the editorial board for the journal ICO: Nordic Review of Iconography.
Anna Ripatti is a historian of nineteenth-century European art and architecture. She has published on a variety of topics, including architectural restoration, art historiography, monuments, history paintings, architectural reforms and decorations. She is particularly interested in the social, political and ideological dimensions of art and architecture. Her ongoing research projects examine architectural standardization and the formation of a gendered working class through architecture in nineteenth-century France, as well as the interconnected histories of ethnography, art and architecture in the Nordic region. Currently, she is University Lecturer in Art History at the University of Helsinki and Principal Investigator of the research project The Political Agency of Architecture in Revolutionary Europe, 1830–1930, funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.
Photograph: Veikko Somerpuro
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