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Susana S. Martins
About
Susana S. Martins is Director of the IHA – Institute of Art History, NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST and Assistant Professor in Contemporary Art and Museology at the Department of Art History, NOVA FCSH, where she also co-directs the MA Programme in Art History and Museology.
Trained as an art historian, she holds a PhD in Photography and Cultural Studies from KU Leuven (Belgium; supervised by Jan Baetens at the the Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture. ). Her research explores the intersection of photography, museology, and exhibition practices. Within museum studies, she has addressed exhibitions histories, virtual heritage, and the revival of historical immersive media, including cosmoramas and related exhibitionary dispositifs. In the field of photography, her work focuses on the relationships between images, exhibitions, and print cultures, with particular attention to photobooks, city portraits, travel imagery, and world expositions. She has authored several publications on these themes and worked with different cultural institutions, museums and curatorial projects.
At the IHA, she is a member of the Museum Studies research group, which she led between 2020 and 2025. At the Associated Laboratory IN2PAST, she is part of the themed line ‘LT3 Museums, Monuments and their Collections’, which she co-coordinated between 2023 and 2026.
She teaches and supervises in the fields of museum studies, history of photography, contemporary art, and nineteenth-century visual culture. She has participated in several FCT-funded research projects, including Curiositas: Peeping Before Virtual Reality. A Media Archaeology of Immersion Through VR and the Iberian Cosmoramas (as Co-PI, with Victor Flores, 2022–2026), and is currently a team member of the project WOMENPHOT.PT What They Saw / What We See: Women Photographers in Portugal, 1860–1920.
Prior to her academic career, Susana S. Martins gained professional experience in museums and has since collaborated extensively with a range of cultural institutions. She recently co-curated the exhibitions Narratives of the Self: Between the Public and the Private. Books by Women Artists in the Art Library (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2024) and The Cosmorama in Lisbon: Virtual Travels in the Nineteenth Century (Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, 2025). She also serves on the scientific committee of the Iberian Forum for Museum Studies, and is a member of the International Panorama Council.
News
The next edition of the Arts and Media Archaeology International Summer School is about to start next 6-10 July 2026, in Antwerp!
March will be the month of International Conference Shifting the Frame – Women’s Photographic Practices (1840–1960). Programme and the beautiful book of abstracts are available. See you in Porto, 5-7 March 2026.
The first book on the subject of cosmoramas was just published. Cosmorama. The Forgotten Medium explores the images, itinerant showmen, routes, and audiences of this long-overlooked visual medium that captivated 19th-century Europe. It is available in print and online, in separate Portuguese and English editions.
Exhibition at Cinemateca Portuguesa opens next 28 June: "Cosmorama. Virtual Travels in the 19th-century" activates a long-forgotten medium and exhibition practice through physical recreations and digital technology.
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