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Julia Secklehner is a cultural historian specialising in modernist art, design and visual culture, with a focus on non-urban spaces, gender, and minority identities. She is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture (KVI). She currently researches handicraft and textile production in Central Europe, the role of folk culture, and the history of fashion and textiles in the region in the twentieth century. She is also interested in social documentary photography, particularly activist youth groups in rural Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Julia holds a PhD in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art and has been a researcher at Masaryk University in Brno since 2019, where she collaborates on the projects “Beyond the Village. Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945” and “Czechs and the Colonial World”. She was a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (2025/25) and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow (2024/25) at Constructor University in Bremen. She is also a series editor for "Transatlantic Perspectives on Central Europe: The Botstiber Institute Series in Austrian-American Studies” at Central European University Press.
Her writing has appeared in the Austrian History Yearbook, Central Europe, and the Journal of Design History. Julia’s recent publications include Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2024) and a special issue of Fotogeschichte (2026) on networks of women photographers in Central Europe.
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Visiting Associate Professor
