German art historian
Markus Ritter (born 1967 in Brunswick and grown up in Wuppertal) is a German art historian and scholar in Oriental Studies specializing on History of Islamic Art. Since 2012 he works as a tenured professor at the Department of Art History of the University of Vienna in Austria.
Ritter studied at the University of Bamberg, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Teheran the disciplines and fields Islamic Art History and Archaeology, Turkology, Iranian Studies, Islamic and Arabic Studies, and Building Archaeology (MA 1994, Dr. phil. 2003). Subsequently, Ritter worked as a postdoc researcher at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In 2010, following teaching assignments at the University of Bamberg and the Goethe University Frankfurt, he was appointed to the newly founded Assistant Professorship for History of Islamic Art at the Fine Arts Department of the University of Zurich. In 2012 he moved as founding professor to the new chair of Islamic Art History at the Department of Art History of the University of Vienna.