PD Dr Dr Grischka Petri is a Research Associate at the Intellectual Property Rights department at FIZ Karlsruhe (Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure) and private lecturer in the field of art history. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Legal Helpdesk team at NFDI4Culture, where conversations concerning digital access to cultural goods are a recurring topic of interest for researchers.

Grischka Petri studied applied cultural studies, art history, philosophy and law in Lüneburg and Bonn. He was awarded a doctorate in law for his thesis on doping sanctions and in art history for his thesis on the career of James McNeill Whistler. Following his second state examination in law, he worked at the University of Glasgow as a Research Associate and co-author of the catalogues raisonnés of Whistler’s etchings and paintings. In 2017, he was awarded his venia legendi in art history at the University of Bonn for a thesis on the history of copyright in art from its earliest manifestations to its rhetorical deconstruction.

Grischka Petri was an associate member of the research group “Ethics of Copying” at the ZiF Bielefeld and a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn. He held interim professorships in Cologne and Tübingen and teaching positions in Bonn, Regensburg and Basel.

His research interests encompass a range of subjects, including British art history, the theory and social practice of photography and printmaking, the relationship between art, law and the market, and Duckburg as a topic of comic studies. He is consistently engaged with current developments in art, copyright and museum law, as well as the framework conditions of access to cultural goods from an aesthetic, ethical and legal perspective: “I am interested in how aesthetic transformation processes come into conflict with normative ideas.”

A selection of his publications is available at https://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/de/bereiche/lebenslauf-und-publikationen-dr-dr-grischka-petri.