Tomoë I. M. Steineck is a historian of religion, visual culture, and East Asian art history affiliated with the University of Zurich and Hosei University, Tokyo. 

Trained in Heidelberg, London, and Tübingen, she combines art history, cultural history, religious studies, and intellectual history to investigate how images participate in the production, negotiation, and contestation of social, political, and religious worlds.
Her research spans China, Korea, Japan, and Europe from antiquity to the modern period. It examines visual agency, image practices, collection histories, religious transmission, and imperial knowledge production, with particular attention to the negotiation regimes through which cultural authority, historical legitimacy, and social hierarchy are constructed and challenged. Her work increasingly explores the temporal architectures of cultural imperialism, including the formation of global historical hierarchies through chronostrategic concepts. By connecting historical image practices with contemporary visual culture, her research investigates how visual narratives continue to shape political imagination, collective memory, and cultural negotiation across time.
Before returning to academia, she worked for many years as a curator and exhibition developer, contributing to major international museum projects and pioneering digital initiatives for the documentation of Japanese religious heritage in European collections. 

These projects laid the foundation for her continuing interest in the relationship between museums, collecting practices, and the production of knowledge.
In 2024 she completed her PhD summa cum laude at the University of Tübingen. Her award-winning dissertation investigates Protestant mission strategies, collecting practices, and the cultural sciences of the nineteenth century in German-speaking Europe and Japan, analysing how visual culture became a site of negotiation between imperial classification and local agency. Her current research further develops these questions through the concepts of visual vocality and chronostrategy, while extending them to contemporary visual culture, including manga as a medium of historical memory, symbolic resistance, and globally circulating visual agency.
From 2024 to 2025 she served as Academic Project Strategist for the University of Zurich–Museum Rietberg Partnership, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between university research and museum practice and developing reciprocal knowledge exchange between research, teaching, and curatorial practice. Since autumn 2025 she has maintained an active international programme of invited lectures and conference presentations across Europe and Japan.