Alice Goff is an assistant professor of German history at the University of Chicago. She received her AB from Bryn Mawr College, MS in archives and records management from the University of Michigan, and PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan’s Society of Fellows. Goff’s work centers on the history of art and politics, museums, cultural preservation, and the humanities. Her article “The Honor of the Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era” was published in Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (ed. Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra; Cornell 2018). Goff’s work has been supported by the Council for Library and Information Resources, German Academic Exchange Service, German Historical Institute, and Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation.
In her Academy project “The God Behind the Marble,” Goff explores the idea that a work of art
can create modern liberal society. At the turn of the nineteenth century, German aestheticians,
chastened by events in France, argued that the fine arts could bloodlessly cultivate free and moral
political subjects in a way that revolution could not. Even as aesthetics proposed art as a
transcendent force of liberation, however, art objects themselves were caught in the upheavals of
cultural property that accompanied the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For German cultural
administrators, the Napoleonic looting of European art collections in particular provoked urgent
struggles over how art could be mobilized to revitalize vanquished German states in concrete
terms. Goff follows artworks and their caretakers as German collections were destroyed and
restored, exhibited and hidden, desecrated and animated between the first despoliations in the
1790s through the foundation of the first public museums in German states in the 1830s. “Through
these upheavals, the value of art as an instrument of liberal cultivation became dependent not on
the theoretical articulation of its transcendent power, but on the confrontation with its material
limitations,” writes Goff. In addition to her research and writing, she also plans to engage with the
2020 opening of the Humboldt Forum, an initiative that first provoked her to consider how and
why the history of Napoleonic looting matters to contemporary life.
Meet Alice Goff
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind this semester in Berlin.
Upcoming events
Discover what’s coming up in the Academy’s public program this semester.
Past events
Lectures, readings, and conversations from the Academy’s public program.
Stepping onto the Pedestal: An Animating History of Art Restitution from the Napoleonic Wars
Alice Goff offers a novel view of the contradictions within nineteenth-century Prussia’s liberal cultural politics—and the consequences for our own understanding of restitution and museology in Germany today.
Berlin Journal Articles
Essays, interviews, and creative work published in the Academy’s annual magazine.
Books
Books written by fellows of the Academy, many begun during a semester in Berlin.
Videos
Lectures, readings, and conversations filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center.
Stepping onto the Pedestal: An Animating History of Art Restitution from the Napoleonic Wars
Alice Goff offers a novel view of the contradictions within nineteenth-century Prussia’s liberal cultural politics—and the consequences for our own understanding of restitution and museology in Germany today.
Fellow Spotlight: Alice Goff
Alice Goff is exploring the idea that a work of art can create modern liberal society.
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
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