Prof. Dr. Eva Specker

Head of the Aesthetics & Learning  lab

Eva Specker joined the IWM as a professor on 01.04.2025, and is the head of the Aesthetics & Learning Lab (ALL). With her lab, she aims to understand how aesthetic experiences can be a source of learning and what can be learned from aesthetic experience, please see the lab page for further details. She has always been interested by the role aesthetics and art play in our lives, and how they can be sources of learning in a broad sense. To study these topics she starts from a strong psychological background, while also integrating other interdisciplinary perspectives.

She completed her Bacherlors in Psychology and her Research Master in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Simultaneously completing minors in museum studies, art history, and art studies, as well as working as a research assistant in various projects until 2015. She completed her PhD in Psychology in 2019 at the University of Vienna, in an interdisciplinary project together with art historians. Afterwards she was a post-doc at the University of Vienna where she led her own FWF-funded research group (2022-2025) and completed her Habilitation (2025). She was a (student) member of the editorial board (2018-2022) of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts where she has been an associate editor since 2022. And has been a board member of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) since 2022.