Lena Liepe

Lena Liepe, born 1962, is a Swedish art historian, who since 2017 has been a professor in art history at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Achievements She has worked at the University of Lund, Sweden, the University of Tromsø, Norway and the University of Oslo, Norway. Her main research areas are medieval art history, art theory and method, genus perspective on medieval art, and icelandic medieval illuminated manuscripts. In her research she has focused on how museums in Sweden grew out of 19th-century displays of medieval church art, and for the moment she completes a major work on the importance of relics in medieval church art. Her broad approach to the study of medieval art and illuminations has had a deep impact on the Nordic research in the different areas she has covered, and she has also been recognized internationally.

Awards She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the International Centre for Medieval Art (ICMA) and the Swedish Art Critics Association (AICA). She has received two of the largest prizes for research in the humanities in the Nordic countries: Jarl Gallén’s prize 2016 to “a renowned Nordic medieval historian”, and Gad Rausing’s prize 2019 for “her pioneering and profound studies of Nordic medieval art”.