About Yannis

Yannis Hadjinicolaou studied Art History, South East Asian Art History, and History in Berlin and Amsterdam. From 2011 to 2014 he held junior research fellowships at the “Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment” and the “Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” (both at Humboldt University, Berlin). From July 2014 to August 2017 he was a postdoc research associate at the project “Symbolic Articulation. Language and Image between Action and Scheme” (Humboldt University), funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.

In 2014 he defended his PhD thesis at the Freie Universität Berlin, entitled Denkende Körper – Formende Hände. Handeling in Kunst und unsttheorie der Rembrandtisten (published in 2016 by Walter de Gruyter). An English translation “ Thinking Bodies — Shaping Hands. Handling in Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandts” is in progress and will be published by Brill in the series Netherlandish Art and Cultural History. During the summer semesters of 2015 and 2016, he taught (lectureship) at the Institute of Art History of Hamburg University. During spring semester 2017 he taught as a lecturer at the Institute of Art History of Basel University, Switzerland. Since June 2017 he is leading (together with Joris van Gastel and Markus Rath) the network “Synagonism in the visual arts,” funded for three years by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is an associate member of “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory.”

He is co-editor of Paragone als Mitstreit, with Joris van Gastel and Markus Rath, Berlin 2014 and Formwerdung und Formentzug, with Franz Engel, Berlin/Boston 2016 and has published various articles, among others for the journals Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, Kritische Berichte, and Wallraf Richartz Jahrbuch.

At NYUAD he is pursuing a pictorial history of falconry, which has largely been neglected by art historians and cultural historians alike. The combination of political power and falconry as a metaphor that is being reflected in a number of images in the Early Modern period is the frame of the investigation. The crucial role of the Mediterranean world in transferring knowledge, images, practices, and the instruments of falconry from the Arab Peninsula and Asia to medieval and early modern Europe will be highlighted. At the same time, it will be shown that certain pictorial traditions and media starting from Europe and the US reach the Arab Peninsula today.