The University of Applied Arts Vienna starts the new academic year with four new professors

Architect and historian Tülay Atak will take up her professorship in architectural theory at the University of Applied Arts on 1 October 2025. Atak is an architect, historian and theorist whose current work focuses on the intersections between environmental history and architecture. She completed her architecture studies at METU in Ankara and earned her doctorate at UCLA. In addition to her own research, she has participated in joint research projects in India and Switzerland and collaborated with non-profit organisations such as Cape Cod Modern House Trust and Grace Farms. Tülay Atak has previously taught at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts and focuses on building bridges between history, theory and design in her teaching. Atak: ‘As architects and academics, we need to think about the “cosmopolitanism” of our profession and our discipline. Architectural theory can reveal the connections between disciplinary knowledge of architecture and contemporary issues.’ 

Also effective 1 October 2025, Jakob Schillinger was appointed university professor of art theory at the Institute for Art Studies, Art Education and Art Mediation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Schillinger is an art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art. His work focuses on theories of the digital and media, discourses of criticality, and ecological approaches in art and art theory. Jakob Schillinger studied visual communication and fine arts in Berlin and New York, as well as art history at Princeton. In 2021, he received his doctorate from Princeton University with a transdisciplinary thesis on the production conditions of post-conceptual painting in Cologne in the 1980s and 1990s. This was followed by a postdoctoral position at Princeton, a research fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, a visiting professorship in cultural theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, and the directorship of the Menzel-Dachs at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University in Berlin. In addition to his academic work, Jakob Schillinger has worked internationally as a curator. His writings have appeared in magazines such as October, Texte zur Kunst, and Artforum.

Jan Völker has been appointed university professor of philosophy at the Institute for Art Studies, Art Education and Art Mediation. Völker studied philosophy, comparative literature and cultural studies in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. His work focuses on aesthetics, continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He received his doctorate from the University of Potsdam in 2009 with a thesis on Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft. In 2023, he habilitated at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main with a thesis on Geteilte Denken bei Marx, Freud, Kant, Hegel. Jan Völker worked as a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts and was a visiting lecturer at Bard College in Berlin for several years. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at the ZRC SAZU postgraduate school in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and held the chair of philosophy and aesthetics at the Bauhaus University Weimar for several semesters. Völker has contributed to various translations and editions of books by Alain Badiou, Alenka Zupančič, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière and others. His latest book is entitled Ein Weltall des Kapitals. Die Überwindung der terrestrischen Vernunft (A Universe of Capital: Overcoming Terrestrial Reason) and was published in 2025 by Matthes & Seitz in Berlin.

Sophie Thun was appointed university professor of artistic photography at the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna on 1 January 2026. Thun works primarily with analogue photography techniques, their spaces, processes, and production and exhibition conditions. From 2023 to 2025, she was a substitute professor in the photography class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and from 2020 to 2023, she was a university assistant at the University of Art and Design Linz. Sophie Thun is a board member of Secession, Association of Visual Artists, Vienna, and a member of the Camera Austria association. She is represented by Galerie Sophie Tappeiner in Vienna. Thun was awarded the Grand Hans Purrmann Prize by the City of Speyer in 2025, the Otto Breicha Prize for Photographic Art and the City of Vienna's Promotion Prize for Fine Arts in 2024, the Outstanding Artist Award by the Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture in 2021, and the DZ Bank Art Collection's working scholarship and prize in 2019. Her works can be found in the collections of Kunsthaus Bregenz, Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Sammlung Verbund (Vienna), Kunststiftung DZ Bank (Frankfurt am Main), Belvedere (Vienna), Wien Museum, Lentos Kunstmuseum (Linz), Kontakt Collection, SMART Museum (Chicago), OÖ Landesmuseum (Linz).