Professor Cordula Grewe joins us as Agathe Lasch Visiting Scholar

12 February 2026, by Stabsstelle Chancengerechtigkeit

Photo: Cordula Grewe

We are delighted to welcome Professor Cordula Grewe as Agathe Lasch Visiting Scholar, sponsored by the university’s Equity Unit, from January 1 to June 30, 2026. Professor Grewe is a leading scholar of modern European art, with particular strengths in visual piety, word–image relations, aesthetics, and the political life of art. Known for her work on Romanticism, print culture, and religious revivalism, Grewe now turns to twentieth- and twenty-first-century questions, including modern theo-aesthetics (Ingres to the Leipzig School), the body as medium (Lady Emma Hamilton to Nicki Minaj) and Art in the Third Reich and its Legacy. The work on that legacy now frames her research in Hamburg and, in turn, provides the topic for her summer-semester seminar.

Grewe’s engagement with art in the so-called Third Reich is guided by a larger scholarly aim: to develop a nuanced critical framework for discussing and exhibiting art produced under National Socialism—one that also confronts its afterlives, enduring cultural force, and appropriation in contemporary media. This reuse is the subject of her current article on antisemitism and ‘Nazisploitation’—the sensational recycling of Nazi imagery—in popular culture. At the center is Nicki Minaj, whose performances of identity also animate Grewe’s book manuscript, Performing Identity: Gender, Class, and Race from Lady Emma Hamilton to Nicki Minaj, currently under review. The animated “lyric” video for Minaj’s track “Only” offers a potent lens on the problematic resonance of Nazi visual culture.

The 2014 video stages Minaj as the supreme leader of an unnamed totalitarian regime. Clad in black leather, she presides over ranks of faceless soldiers, her militarized authority reinforced by cameos of Drake, Lil Wayne, and Chris Brown as high-ranking officers. Drawing on graphic-novel aesthetics, the stark palette of red, black, and white evokes the dystopian idiom of Sin City, while echoing Nazi propaganda, SS iconography, and Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic lexicon. When Minaj recasts the logo of her label Young Money as a stylized Roman numeral III, the mark edges uncomfortably close to the swastika’s visual logic. The result reads as a postmodern Triumph of the Will—a bid for power, dominance, and control unsettling in its rhetoric, and deeply controversial in its timing and tone. Grewe’s article, tentatively titled “From Harajuku Barbie to SS Action Heroine: Nicki Minaj’s Self-Fashioning,” takes this video as a critical flashpoint to shed light on the intersection of race, power, and representation and its discontents. It invites reflection on Black cultural production; on the long, complicated dynamics between Black and Jewish communities (marked by both solidarity and strain); and on the troubling reemergence of Nazisploitation in contemporary popular culture. While Minaj has helped reshape how Black women claim space, agency, and visibility on a global stage, she has also courted controversy—from anti-vaccine rhetoric and conspiracy theories to collaborations with Ye (formerly Kanye West), whose antisemitic outbursts have drawn widespread criticism. Against the backdrop of rising antisemitism in parts of the music industry and a mounting backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Grewe tentatively proposes the concept of “emancipatory toxicity” to describe the uneasy conditions of performing identity at a moment when liberation and harm so often share the same stage.

Hosted by Professor Dr. Iris Wenderholm, Grewe’s visit is more than an academic exchange. Building on a 2025 collaboration supported by IU’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs through a Primary Partner Faculty Grant, the visit seeks to advance a durable partnership between the art history departments at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Hamburg. Professor Grewe is honored to pursue this work under the auspices of Agathe Lasch (1879–1942), a pioneering scholar and the first female professor of German studies in the German lands. Murdered by the Nazis in 1942, Lasch remains a touchstone of courage and intellectual rigor in German academia. Inspired by her legacy, Grewe takes up Lasch’s 1921 injunction to “tear down outdated […] views.”