Meike Hopp is Junior Professor of Digital Provenance Research at the Technische Universität Berlin. She studied art history, archeology, and theater studies at the LMU Munich and received the Heinrich Wölfflin Prize.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich, she directed projects on Nazi plunder, art market research, and collection history in the field of provenance research until 2019. In 2018 she received a research scholarship from the excellence cluster Topoi. She is a member of the steering committee of the Science Gallery Berlin and an associated member of the Einstein Center Digital Future. She also chairs the international Arbeitskreises Provenienzforschung e.V., a provenance research working group, and, since 2021, she been the Chair of the Curatorium of the German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg.
She researches (digital) infrastructures for provenance research at museums and other cultural facilities, their conditions and requirements, and the opportunities provided by the standardization of provenance data, focusing on the development of long-term data infrastructures that can be utilized across object genres and contexts. Provenance research is not yet a self-evident topic in society and is conveyed by institutions rather one-sidedly, if at all. The control that they therefore have of the expert knowledge developed there is continued in the decentralized and often semi-transparent way that research findings are documented, which means that almost no interdisciplinary knowledge transfer can take place with fields like memory cultures and that active exchange within society (for example, in citizen science projects) is not taken into account.
Publications
Meike Hopp, “Ideologie und Exzess – Die Kulturgut-Raubzüge der Nationalsozialisten,” in Beute: Eine Anthologie zu Kunstraub und Kulturerbe, ed. by Isabelle Dolezalek, Bénédicte Savoy and Robert Skwirblies (Berlin: Mattes & Seitz, 2021), 305–312.
Meike Hopp and Christian Fuhrmeister, “Rethinking Provenance Research,” The Getty Research Journal 11 (2019), 213–231.
Meike Hopp, “Wir sind mehr als Kunstdetektive! Ein Appell zur Stärkung der Provenienzforschung,” KMN (Kultur Management Network) Magazin 140 (Januar 2019), 13–20.
Meike Hopp, “Provenienzrecherche und digitale Forschungsinfrastrukturen in Deutschland: Tendenzen, Desiderate, Bedürfnisse,” in …(k)ein Ende in Sicht: 20 Jahre Kunstrückgabegesetz in Österreich, ed. by Eva Blimlinger and Heinz Schödl (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018), 35–59 (Schriftenreihe der Kommission für Provenienzforschung, vol. 8).
Meike Hopp, Kunsthandel im Nationalsozialismus: Adolf Weinmüller in München und Wien (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2012), (Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, 30).