Warja’s research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, religion and material culture: why and how have people – since time immemorial – perceived inanimate objects to be carriers of the divine? This fascination with the entanglement of objects, arts and beliefs was the reason for a drastic career switch. After working at sea for nine years in shipping and offshore, Warja started a Bachelor in Art History, followed by a Research Master Arts & Culture at the University of Leiden (both cum laude). In 2021, Warja was awarded the Ted Meijerprize for her ResMA thesis “Domine Quo Vadis: Appropriation, Veneration and Fabrication, Traces of the Divine”. Until 2022, Warja was editor-in-chief of Roma Aeterna, a semiannual interdisciplinary journal dedicated to Rome. Since 2023, Warja is a member of eikones’ graduate school.

Christ as Mother: Material Culture and Devotional Practices in Female Religiosity in the Low Countries (c. 1500 – c. 1700)

Warja’s current project deals with the representation of Christ as Mother in the Low Countries from c. 1500 through c. 1700. Her dissertation places particular emphasis on present-day Belgium, where a significant concentration of images and objects relating to the theme of Christ as Mother were made and still survive, many of them associated with female religious communities. The project departs from the historiographic hypothesis that persistent conflations of gender and sexuality in art historical scholarship have impeded our understanding of maternal depictions of Christ in the researched timeframe. Challenging these conflations, the dissertation explores how various late medieval and 16th-century theorizations of the body, gender, biological sex, and sexuality, and theological investments in Christ’s maternity played a role in shaping this distinctive visual tradition in The Low Countries.