Julia van Rosmalen (°1992) is a voluntary research fellow at the KU Leuven. She is working part-time as an assistant to professor Barbara Baert. She is currently preparing a PhD study on the origin of the iconography of biblical cherubim. Her project will investigate their function as supporting in architectural settings and as throne bearers and compare this with hybrid heavenly creatures found in surrounding cultures that seem to fulfil a similar role.
In 2018-2019 she followed her Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Here she took the specialist course ‘The supernatural middle ages: images of the extraordinary’ with professor Alixe Bovey and professor Jessica Barker. She wrote her dissertation on medieval werewolf iconography “Letting the wolf in: How the werewolf is used to explore duality, and the effects of said duality, on inclusion and exclusion from the community in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica”.
For her Bachelor’s degree in art history from 2013-2017, she studied at the University of Amsterdam. She complemented this degree with a minor in religious studies and a minor in philosophy. During this period she worked as the teaching assistant of professor Rachel Esner for two years.
