Henrike Lange is a historian of art, architecture, and literature in the medieval and early modern worlds of Europe — especially in Italy and across the Mediterranean — and the long nineteenth century. Across her disciplines, she has long engaged with the works and legacies of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Richard Krautheimer, and Friedrich Hollaender.

Lange’s work in history and historiography is informed by the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, exile and migration from Germany, Italy, France, and Spain into the UK and US, and the Warburg Circle, especially Fritz Saxl and Leopold David Ettlinger. Ettlinger taught between 1970 and 1980 Italian Renaissance art in Berkeley’s Department of History of Art where Lange has become a steward of his slides collection. She has also worked on the exiled musicologist Alfred Einstein and his legacy in Berkeley (Munich 2022 invited lecture “Dante in El Cerrito” and chapter “Berkeley als geistige Lebensform: Alfred Einstein’s Arrival in the Bay Area,” forthcoming in Sebastian Bolz ed., Alfred Einsteins “Das italienische Madrigal”).

Lange’s own scholarship in art, architecture, and literature history involves also Jewish and Christian dialogues and theological questions in Augustine, Dante, Martin Luther, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her teaching regularly includes case studies from the history of French-, Italian-, and German-Jewish literature, philosophy, art, music, and cinema.

Lange’s book chat with her colleague Whitney Davis (presenting Giotto’s Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility, Cambridge University Press 2023) about Giotto’s Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua and the Arch of Titus in Rome was hosted in spring 2023 by the Townsend Center’s Director Stephen Best and is available on the Townsend Center’s website and YouTube channel.

Upcoming: Eclipse & Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts — Henrike Lange’s seven-year interdisciplinary project with theoretical physicist Tom McLeish FRS (Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of York), forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024.