Sonya Petersson

Sonya Petersson is a Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Research Officer at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. She is affiliated with the Network of Image Studies, where she contributes to workshops and seminars in image studies.

• Education:
  • Doctoral dissertation Konst i omlopp: Mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft (2014) on 18th-century art mediation.
  • Postdoctoral project Graphic Illustration: Image and Text from the Point of View of Mechanical Reproduction (2016–19) on 19th-century illustration technologies.

Research Focus: Sonya's work bridges image studies, intermediality, and media history. Her current project Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the 119th-Century Media Culture (2024–27) examines 19th-century public lectures with projected images, analyzing how they mediated knowledge through cross-disciplinary case studies. Previous projects include Metadata Culture (2020), which explored digital archival practices.

Publications: Her recent articles address metareference in 19th-century media, semiotic applications in art history, and digital archival challenges. Her work often investigates how reproductive media (like xylography and digital photography) redefine image-text relationships.

Teaching: Sonya instructs in art history and visual studies at both undergraduate and advanced levels. She directs the Bachelor’s Programme in Art History and supervises student theses on theoretical and methodological frameworks.

Research Leadership: As a Research Officer, she contributes to the Network of Image Studies, promoting transdisciplinary dialogue between art history, media theory, and visual culture. Her work critiques traditional historiography of art and media, emphasizing mixed media objects and digital heritage.