Marjan Sterckx is associate professor of Art History at Ghent University. She lectures on the histories of nineteenth-century art and of interior design, and supervises many MA and PhD theses in these fields. 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 art, especially sculpture, in relation to gender and space, both public and domestic, as well as interior design history, c. 1750-1950. She published articles in manifold journals, including Sculpture Journal, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and History of Photography, and chapters in several edited volumes. She co-edited herself 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 an edited volume on the 19th-century Belgian triennial Salons (with Jan Dirk Baetens and Tom Verschaffel). In 2021 in Ghent, she created the exhibition and catalog Crime Scenes, on Belgian interwar interiors through the lens of forensic photography.
Sterckx received the Rakow Grant for Glass Research from Corning Museum of Glass, New York in 2009, and 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), as well as 'Laureaat van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, klasse Kunsten' in 2019.
Research interests: 19th-century art & art practice, 19th-century sculpture, women sculptors, sculpture & photography, monuments, art & gender, art & corporeality, art & the interior, interior painting, historic interiors, design history
