Sasha Rossman specializes in the material and visual culture of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on material culture. He also is active as a curator and contemporary art critic. After completing his first degree in the history of art at Wesleyan University (CT, USA), he continued his studies with a degree in fine arts at The Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences (NY, USA), where he expanded his knowledge of artistic materials and techniques. A DAAD grant brought him to Berlin to study art history at the Humboldt University. After several years active as a curator, artist, and artist collaborator, Rossman completed his MA in art history at Berlin’s Freie Universität. Subsequently, he pursued his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the political and social role(s) of tables in the long 17th century, which will be published in 2026 by the University of Amsterdam Press/Taylor & Francis. This dissertation was in part based on research performed with a Mellon Curatorial Grant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2015. It also profited from numerous grants, including a DAAD fellowship and a multi-year DFG-funded research position at the University of Konstanz. In 2024, he joined the SNF-funded research project "Inheritance of Looting: Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums" for which he helped write a successful funding application. In this project, he continued his research into the agency of material culture and its role in structuring social and political relations. A monograph is forthcoming in 2026 that grew out of this work that deals with the fate of jewels looted in the Burgundian Wars (1476-1477). As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bern, he has initiated three interdisciplinary initiatives to build international networks for researchers studying pre-modern flags, border topographies, and pre-modern material practices of repair and restoration. He is an active member of the Renaissance Society of America. He has taught a variety of courses for undergraduate and master students at the University of Bern, the University of Bielefeld, and the University of California, Berkeley and has supervised BA theses in English and German on a range of topics. His courses have a broad historical span, since they include not only early modern material culture and art/architectural history, but also art historical methods, material culture studies, exhibition and museum studies, as well as critical theory. His new research project focuses on the political and social roles of looted early modern flags as well as the problems that their fragile materiality posed – and still poses – to their preservation.
