Dr. Sara Benninga

Sara Benninga is an art historian and contemporary artist whose work is situated at the intersection of art history, cultural history, and the history of ideas. Her research engages with questions of corporeality, affect, and the visual articulation of licit and illicit experience in the early modern period, and an emerging line of inquiry explores the intersection between activism, society, and contemporary art.

Benninga completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2017 and holds lecturing positions in the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University and in the Department of Visual and Material Culture at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Her teaching spans early modern art history, iconography, and visual culture, with courses on Baroque art in the Low Countries, Dutch genre painting, the German Renaissance and the work of Rubens, and contemporary art and society.

Her monograph Pleasure and Flesh in the Art of Rubens. Representing the Body in Early Modern Painting is forthcoming with transcript Verlag (July 2026). She has published on Rubens’s letters and epistolary culture, Rubens’s Bacchic paintings, the iconography of the meal, conjugal allegory in Titian, the representation of fatness and the senses, and the prints of the Fontainebleau School. In April 2026, she convened the session “The Proclivities of Pleasure in Early Modern Art” at the Association of Art Historians annual conference in Cambridge, England. Her research has been supported by grants from Erasmus Mundus, Erasmus+, the Saxony Exchange Program, and the Minerva Stiftung. 

In the fall of 2027 Benninga will be a research fellow at Hamburg University, in the DFG research group “Imaginaria of force”.