Margit Kern is a professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg. She was a professor of Art History of Spain and Latin America at the Kunsthistorisches Institut from the Free University of Berlin from 2011 to 2012. From 2009 to 2011 she was an endowed junior professor of Art History at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her qualification took place in 2010 at the Free University of Berlin, with the publication of Transkulturelle Imaginationen des Opfers, which deals with the concepts of sacrifice in missions in New Spain and in Europe in early Modern Age. The aim of the book is to write "entangled histories" showing that Europe also changed itself in contact with the Americas. In 1998 she obtained her doctorate for a study of the art of the Reformation (Tugend versus Gnade, which was awarded with the Martin-Luther Prize in 2000).

Margit Kern specializes in early Modern Age art, investigating religious art and cross-cultural negotiation processes in art. Another of her main lines of research is history of photography. In 2011 she received a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to spend nine months at Yale University. In order to promote the studies of Spanish and Latin American art in the field of art history in Germany, she founded the study group “Spanische und iberoamerikanische Kunstgeschichte” in 2006. She is a member of the board of the Carl Justi Association for the promotion of cooperation between Germany, Spain, Portugal and Latin America in the field of art history. Together with Klaus Krüger she has published Transcultural Imaginations of the Sacred (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2019). Her most recent project is dedicated to “visual skepticism” (“visuelle Skepsis”).