Marjan Sterckx is associate professor of Art History at Ghent University. She lectures on the histories of nineteenth-century art and of interior design. She is the founding chair of the UGent-VUB research group The Inside Story: Art, Interior & Architecture 1750-1950 (ThIS), that yearly organizes the Studiedag Historisch Interieur en Design. Sterckx is founding co-editor of Brepols Publishers' book series XIX. Studies in 19th-century Art and Visual culture, and co-editor of Tijdschrift voor Interieurgeschiedenis en Design. She is a board member of ESNA (European Society of Nineteenth-century Art) and advisory board member of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW) and Oud Holland.
Her research concerns the intersections between art, gender and space, both public and domestic, during the period c. 1750-1950. She published articles in manifold journals, including Sculpture Journal, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Journal of Interior Design, and History of Photography, and chapters in several edited volumes. In 2021, she created the exhibition Crime Scenes in Ghent, on Belgian interwar interiors through the lens of forensic photography, and its catalogue. In 2023, she edited the volume Yvonne Serruys (1873-1953), Sculpteur de la femme nouvelle (in French and Dutch) and curated the exhibition of the same name in Menen. She co-edited the volumes Sculpting Abroad: Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century (with Tom Verschaffel, Brepols, 2020), and Male Bonds in Nineteenth-Century Art (with Thijs Dekeukeleire and Henk de Smaele, Leuven University Press, 2021). Currently, she prepares edited volumes on the 19th-century Belgian triennial Salons (with Jan Dirk Baetens and Tom Verschaffel), and on Cultures of Belgian Space 1860-1924 (with Dominique Bauer and Ilja Van Damme).
Sterckx was awarded the ‘Tri-annual Award for Humanities' of Academische Stichting Leuven for her PhD research on women sculptors and their work in the metropolis (Paris, London, Brussels, 1770-1953), 'Laureaat van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, klasse Kunsten' in 2019, the Onderwijsprijs (Teaching award) of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University in 2022, and the Journal of Interior Design's Best Article award 2022 for the article ‘The interior as a witness', and she received the Rakow Grant for Glass Research (2009) from Corning Museum of Glass, New York.
Research interests: 19th-century art & art practice, women artists, monuments, sculpture & photography, art & gender, art & corporeality, art & the interior, historic interiors, design history
