Governance The FI TCH Board
The FI TCH is governed by a Board composed of professors and junior scholars from Field of Focus 3 and 4 (six in total). The Speaker of the FI TCH is Christiane Brosius, and the Deputy Speaker is Dirk Werle.
Implementing the strategic goals associated with the FI TCH and the Heidelberg University’s Excellence Strategy is the central focus of the Board. Additionally, the Board fosters scientific exchange within the FI TCH, identifies new research areas, and drives new research collaborations.
The tasks of the Board include:
- Coordinating the Flagship Initiative,
- Identifying new perspectives and research fields within the Flagship Initiative,
- Acting as mentors for young researchers,
- Initiating project proposals to various funding institutions (especially the German Research Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the European Commission),
- Identifying transfer potentials and promoting transfer orientation,
- Establishing and evaluating shared research infrastructures.
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius
brosius@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
Christiane Brosius (FI TCH Speaker) has been a Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies since 2009. She leads the international research project “Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia.” Christiane has been a founding member and speaker of the Shaping Asia network initiative and the online platform Tasveer Ghar (“House of Pictures”) since 2006. Christiane also served as project leader for the EU-funded HERA project “Creating the ‘New’ Asian Woman: Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters, and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi” and for the collaborative network “Urban Transformation and Placemaking: Fostering Learning from South Asia and Germany.” Since 2018, Christiane leads the binational Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP), a digital open-access database documenting endangered cultural heritage in the Kathmandu Valley (funded by Arcadia, London). She is also a board member of Heidelberg University Press and the Heidelberg Centre for Digital HUmanities (HCDH, Digital Heritage). Since 2020, she has been a member of the FI TCH board, serving as its spokesperson since 2021. Her research focuses on cultural heritage, natural disasters, and urban transformation in South Asia; aging and youth culture in South Asia; art production as a social resource; transcultural and and transregional challenges for Critical area studies.
Deputy Speaker
Prof. Dr. Dirk Werle
dirk.werle@gs.uni-heidelberg.de
Dirk Werle is co-speaker of the FI TCH and is Professor of Modern German Literature at Heidelberg University since 2015. He has been a member of the Board of the Grimmelshausen Society since 2016, co-initiator of the research network “Frühe Neuzeit Südwest” since 2017, editor of the journal “Euphorion” since 2022, editor of the series “Das Abendland. Neue Folge” series published by Vittorio Klostermann since 2018. He has been deputy spokesperson of the FI TCH since 2021. Main research interests: European literary history in the context of intellectual history since the 16th century; theory and methodology of literary studies; descriptive patterns of literary and cultural history (tradition, fame, translation, time); history of science in the humanities and cultural studies; literature as (im)material cultural heritage; genre history in the early modern period (lyric poetry, fictional narrative, epic verse).
