Current projects

Establishment of an interdisciplinary endowed professorship in provenance research and the history of collections

The academic discourse in provenance research spans many different disciplines and now extends far beyond the National Socialist era. Armed conflicts result in works of art being moved around, both back in Napoleon’s day and now with Iraqi and Syrian antiquities. While museums have in recent years been setting up bodies to conduct research into individual works and their collections and in order to draw on project funding from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture to support such work, this nascent field of research is still lacking a firm foothold at university level. The University of Bern would like to do something about this and set up Switzerland’s first ever professorship for provenance research and the history of collections. It hopes to build up the basic interdisciplinary research required and to train up the next generation of academics needed in this field. In order to set up the professorship and maintain it for ten years, we are looking for CHF 5 million in funding.