Kuehn’s research focuses on Islamic mysticism (Sufism), Islamic art and aesthetics, and the religious cultures of Islam in historical and contemporary contexts, with particular emphasis on Europe, the Balkans, Western Asia, and South Asia. Combining art-historical research with long-term ethnographic fieldwork, she explores how religious realms are made visible through images, objects, bodies, rituals, sensory experiences, landscapes, and the imagination, and how these forms mediate presence, memory, authority, and belonging. Areas of interest include Sufism across Europe and South Asia, gender and religious authority, pilgrimage and saint veneration, religious pluralism and shared religious sites, ecology and the more-than-human world, angels and other intermediary beings, and the sensory and embodied dimensions of religious life.

A second, longstanding strand of her scholarship examines the migration and transformation of images, symbols, objects, and ideas across religious and cultural boundaries and over the longue durée. Her work on dragons, composite beings, angels, and other intermediary figures traces the movement of iconographies between the Islamic world, Eastern Christianity, Western and Central Asia, and East Asia, asking how visual forms acquire new meanings as they travel between religious traditions, geographical regions, and historical periods. This research has developed into her current book project on monsters, hybrids, and species-defying beings in ancient and late antique Western Asia.

Kuehn was trained as an art historian and archaeologist across several regional traditions. She received her doctorate magna cum laude in Islamic and Eastern Christian Art History and Archaeology from the Free University of Berlin in 2009, following an MA in Islamic and Central Asian/Chinese Art and Archaeology from SOAS University of London and a BA in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Art and Archaeology from International Christian University in Tokyo. This broad training continues to inform her comparative and transcultural approach to the study of religion, art, and visual culture.

Her scholarship combines the close analysis of manuscripts, textiles, architecture, religious objects, and images with ethnographic research among contemporary religious communities. Long-term fieldwork in southeastern and western Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia has increasingly brought questions of lived religion, ritual, sensory experience, memory, gender, ecology, and religious authority into dialogue with her art-historical work. Rather than treating premodern art history and contemporary anthropology as separate fields, her research explores the continuities and tensions among objects, images, religious ideas, and embodied practices across time.

Museum and curatorial work constitute another important dimension of this approach. Between 1998 and 2008, Kuehn undertook regular research and consulting missions in Western Asia in connection with UNESCO and United Nations Development Programme initiatives, particularly in collaboration with the Kuwait National Museum and Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, the al-Sabah Collection. She subsequently worked on and co-curated exhibitions and research projects concerned with Islamic art, shared religious spaces, religious diversity, and contemporary religious life. Her curatorial practice has reinforced an enduring concern with the ways objects and images acquire meaning through display, juxtaposition, movement, and changing contexts of interpretation.

Her research has been supported by numerous international fellowships and grants, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship under Horizon 2020, an EURIAS Fellowship at the New Europe College in Bucharest, fellowships at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study and IMéRA in Marseille, an Overseas Visiting Fellowship at the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, and research support from the Austrian Research Foundation, the Iran Heritage Foundation, the Orient-Institut Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation, and the City of Vienna.

Her books include The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (Brill, 2011), which was jointly awarded the 2013 World Prize for Book of the Year of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Monsters or Bearers of Life-Giving Powers? Trans-Religious Migrations of an Ancient Western Asian Symbolism (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2016). Her recent editorial work includes Art, Aesthetics, and Islamic Mysticism: Contemporary Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), Female Visions: Women and Visuality in Contemporary Islamic Mysticism (2026), and Angelologies of Medieval Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Shared Skies (University of Wales Press, 2026), as well as The Intermediate Worlds of Angels: Islamic Representations of Celestial Beings in Transcultural Contexts (Ergon, 2019), co-edited with Stefan Leder and Hans-Peter Pökel. She has also guest-edited special issues devoted to shared religious sites in the Mediterranean and contemporary female Islamic mysticism.

Kuehn is currently developing two book projects that bring together the principal strands of her research.

Vision and Visuality in European Sufism draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Sufi communities across southeastern and western Europe make religious worlds perceptible through saints and shrines, images and calligraphy, ritual bodies, pilgrimage landscapes, photography, music, light, relics, dress, domestic spaces, and digital media. More broadly, the project asks how perception itself is cultivated and how visible and sensory forms mediate presence, memory, charisma, gender, authority, and belonging. Its foundations lie in many years of research on Sufi communities, pilgrimage, saintly traces, ritual sensory experience, and shared religious landscapes across Europe.

Her second book project, Monsters, Hybrids, and Deviants in Western Asia (2500 BCE to 650 CE), returns to the longue durée of religious imagery and transcultural exchange. The study investigates hybrid and species-defying beings, particularly composite animal and animal-human forms, across Western Asia over more than three millennia. It examines how such figures moved between cultural and religious worlds, how their forms and meanings were transformed in the process, and how categories of hybridity, alterity, monstrosity, protection, and supernatural power were negotiated through the visual imagination. The project builds upon her longstanding research into dragons, composite beings, religious symbolism, and the migration of iconographies across geographical, cultural, and religious boundaries.