As an art historian who studies the way we have constructed our understanding of the past through the way we have interpreted art, I am comfortable discussing cultural heritage issues, exhibition and conservation, and the motivation and meaning behind most periods and places of art-historical production.
Research
Marquardt studies the epistemological meanings of cultural heritage and the ideological function of patrimony: How we construct the past through the conservation, renovation, exhibition, and narrative about historical monuments and objects. She is most concerned with eleventh- and twelfth-century French examples. Her topics range from the ruined abbey of Cluny to nineteenth-century neo-medieval churches and from the edgy modernist photographs of the Zodiaque publications to the taxonomy of the term “Romanesque.” In studying these questions, she employs at various times the interrelated perspectives of the fields of social, religious, political, economic, literary, and art history as well as cultural geography, visual communication, marketing and heritage management, and feminist theory.
