Prof Dr Kilian Heck is Professor of Art History at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute at the University of Greifswald. His research focuses on the relationship of art and science in the 19th century, German sepulchral sculpture and German court art of the 15th to 17th centuries, the political iconography of the early modern period and castle architecture of the 18th century. As part of his research on restitution and provenance, Kilian Heck deals with the history of the origin of paintings. He is particularly interested in the works of the landscape painter Carl Blechen.

Within the THEORIA project he researches the topos of the North in Romantic painting (motifs, forms of socialization, receptions). The project intends to investigate how, after 1800, a specifically northern pictorial world could establish itself, including other painted natural phenomena such as fog, clouds, snow, rocks or oaks. The investigation will be completed by exploring the topos of "Nordic art" in the history of art in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a deliberately chosen counter-model to the iconographic method, which focuses primarily on Renaissance art.

Dr Birte Frenssen is a senior curator at the Pomeranian State Museum Greifswald, where she supervised the donation of the Danish Romanticists and Realists to the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by Christoph Müller, Berlin. Her research project includes a two-volume inventory catalog of the paintings and drawings that will be created for this collection. In recent years, the collection of North German Romanticism in the Pomeranian State Museum has been continuously expanded, while her research interests specifically include the work of Caspar David Friedrich, a native of Greifswald. In 2010 she presented the exhibition "The Birth of Romanticism – Friedrich. Runge. Klinkowström.” and in 2013 the book "Naturally Romantic. Caspar David Friedrich & Friends in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania”.

Dr Jana Olschewski studied Art History and English language and literature and realized numerous publications and projects on Pomeranian history, visual arts and architecture and has worked for more than ten years at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute of the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald. Since 2008 she is also the editor of the magazine POMMERN.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the THEORIA project, Jana Olschewski uses Schwaan to examine the phenomenon of artist colonies in terms of their reception of romantic ideas, design modes and forms of socialization. The work of Theodor Hagen, who as professor at the Weimar Art School has trained the most important representatives of the artist colony, will be of particular interest for the first time. Hagen as a teacher and artist has long been recognized in the art world, but so far has been little appreciated by the research community.

Nico Anklam studied Art History, Cultural Studies and Aesthetics in Berlin, London and as a Fulbright Scholar in New York and is a doctoral fellow of the THEORIA research group. His dissertation examines Danish painting in the mid-19th century with regard to national identity constructions, also in relation to "Nordic Orientalism" and the image production of the colonies of the former Danish West Indies.

Before joining the University of Greifswald he taught at the Bologna.Lab of the Humboldt University in Berlin on art of the 20th century and was most recently a lecturer in Art Theory at the Institute for Art History and Aesthetics of the Berlin University of the Arts. His previous research interests focussed on strategies of South African conceptual art around 1990, as well as Fluxus and Fluxus related practices in Northern and Northeastern Europe. In addition, he has realized international projects of contemporary art in the Nordic and Baltic region, for instance as curator at Kunsthal 44 Møen, Denmark.

As part of her master's thesis in 2016, Christel Bair dealt with New Objectivity and Magical Realism as well as the possibilities of cultural diversity as the driving force of artistic activity. She studied history and art history at the University of Greifswald and is now a doctoral student at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute for Art History. In her current doctoral project, she deals with transcultural references between the romantic landscape painting in Denmark and northern Germany in the 19th century. Together with Nico Anklam, she prepares the complete catalog of the works of Danish artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which were donated to the Pomeranian State Museum Greifswald by Christoph Müller.