Fellow 2024/2025 Clemena Antonova
Clemena Antonova received her academic training as an art historian from the University of Edinburgh, where she earned her Master's degree, and the University of Oxford, where she pursued a Ph.D. Her doctoral research, supervised by art historian Emeritus Prof. Martin Kemp and philosopher Prof. Paul Crowther, was published as Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God (Ashgate, UK: 2010). This work contributes to the field of "theology through the arts."
Clemena has taught art and cultural history at several universities, including institutions in Morocco and Bulgaria, where she spent five years at the American University. She also teaches part-time at Sofia University, Bulgaria, and for an American summer program in the UK. Her research explores the intersection of art history and theology, religious philosophy, with a special focus on Russian religious philosophy and the role of religion in modernity. Her research has been supported by fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Edinburgh, The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Belgium, the Morphomata Centre in Cologne, Aix-Marseille University, among others.
Her recent publications include Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky's Theory of the Icon (Routledge, 2020); "Christian Philosophy as a Philosophy of Crisis: Re-reading Florensky in the Twenty-first Century" in Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); and "The Icon and Visual Arts at the Time of the Russian Religious Renaissance" in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is a regular contributor to journals such as Sobornost, Leonardo, and Cithara. Recently, Clemena guest-curated the exhibition Icons for Our Time: Orthodox Art from around the World at the Icons Museum, USA (14 October 2021 - 3 April 2022).
Currently, she serves as the Research Director of the "World in Pieces” Programme at the Institut für Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.