Dr. des. Corinna Mairhanser
Program Coordination
Office address:
Room K312
Profile
- Education and professional career
- Corinna Mairhanser conducts research at the intersection of archaeology and art history, focusing on visual culture, perception, and staging. She completed her bachelor's degree in archaeology and art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (starting in 2014), where she developed an early interest in how images, spaces, and objects were experienced, staged, and imbued with meaning in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. During her master's studies, she specialized in Late Antique and Byzantine art history; an Erasmus exchange at the University of Vienna (2019) broadened her perspective with international experience and methodological insights. Her studies were supported by the Deutschlandstipendium scholarship, and her master's thesis was awarded the LMU Research Prize for Excellent Students in 2020. From 2018 to 2022, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute of Byzantine Studies. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute for Byzantine Studies. From 2020 to 2024, she pursued her doctorate at LMU Munich, writing her dissertation on the performative function of curtains in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages. The project was funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Hanns Seidel Foundation and supported by the doctoral program in Classical Studies at the Munich Center for Ancient Worlds. Her dissertation was awarded the Faculty 12 Dissertation Prize in 2025. Since August 2024, Corinna Mairhanser has been a research associate in the Department of Late Antique and Byzantine Art History at LMU Munich and, as program coordinator, oversees the five archaeology master's programs. Her research takes a cultural studies-oriented approach with a particular interest in visual and multisensory spaces of experience, iconographic codes, and the staging of space and liturgy. A central theme in her work is the interplay between image, materiality, and perception in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.