Professor Dr. Christian Wiese, Martin-Buber Professor of Philosophy of Jewish Religion at Goethe University Frankfurt, will become a new member of the Board of Directors of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. This decision was made by the board in its meeting on October 24, 2018.

Christian Wiese (Foto: Stefanie Wetzel)

Christian Wiese has been a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg since 2017 and is a director of the LOEWE Research Initiative »Religious Positioning« (2017–2020), which invites fellows to the Kolleg in its function as a cooperating partner. As a Goethe Fellow, Wiese is working at the Kolleg on a project on »Mutual Perceptions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Cultural Interactions, Religious-Political Conflicts and Rapprochement in Dialogue«. The director of the Forschungskolleg, Professor Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, is very pleased with the new appointment: »Christian Wiese is an internationally renowned, engaged and very well integrated colleague with a very wide horizon of interests. He has demonstrated the ability to bring a wide variety of colleagues together and to create and lead interdisciplinary research projects. We need such scholars on the board of directors. « At the Kolleg he will oversee and develop projects and fields having to do with the relationship of the three monotheistic religions.

Christian Wiese has held the Martin-Buber Professorship since 2010. Previous to that he was professor of Jewish history at the University of Sussex, where he was also director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and founder and co-director of the Centre for Modern European Cultural History. After studying Protestant theology in Tübingen and Bonn, he studied Jewish studies in Jerusalem and Heidelberg and then completed his doctoral studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. He received his Habilitation in 2006 at the University of Erfurt in religious studies/Jewish studies.