Elisabeth Décultot is the Director of the IZEA Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies and Humboldt Professor for Modern Written Culture and European Knowledge Transfer at the Institute of German Literature, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
Her research focuses on the connection between literature, art theory, and art history from the 17th to the 19th century in Germany, especially in the 18th century, as well as on the methods of reading and writing in the Early Modern European scholarship. Much of her work is dedicated to Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In 2010, she curated the exhibition “Musées de papier. L’Antiquité en livres, 1600-1800” at the Louvre Museum in Paris and in 2017 the exhibition “Winckelmann. Moderne Antike/Winckelmann. Modern Antiquity” in Weimar.