DAAD appoints two German academics to prestigious professorships in Argentina and Brazil

DAAD appoints two German academics to prestigious professorships in Argentina and Brazil

(IN BRIEF) The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has announced the appointment of Professor Lisa Diedrich and Dr Laura Kemmer to the Walter Gropius Professorship at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and the Martius Professorship at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, respectively. The appointments will strengthen academic relationships between Germany and Latin America, and help address global challenges such as climate change and global health risks. Professor Diedrich is a landscape architecture expert and advocate for sustainable urban development, while Dr Kemmer’s research focuses on urban anthropology and human geography. The five-year appointments will promote academic cooperation relating to sustainable development and planetary health.

(PRESS RELEASE) BONN, 5-Apr-2023 — /EuropaWire/ — ‘There are multifaceted relationships that unite Germany and Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil. Our academic cooperation has been stable for many years and is underpinned by great personal commitment on the part of those involved. These countries and their science systems are also becoming ever more important as partners in the current world order, especially in terms of addressing global challenges like the climate crisis or global health risks. I am therefore delighted that we were able to recruit these two proven experts to fill the prestigious DAAD visiting professorships in Argentina and Brazil. Their interdisciplinary approaches will provide significant impetus to our academic cooperation relating to sustainable development and planetary health’, said DAAD President Professor Joybrato Mukherjee.

Professor Lisa Diedrich studied Architecture and Urban Development in Paris, Marseilles and Stuttgart, and Landscape Architecture in Copenhagen. It was there that she completed her doctorate on the Design of Post-industrial Landscapes. Since 2006, she has been editor in chief of the book series ‘Landscape Architecture Europe’ and the journal ‘scape – the international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism’. Since 2012, she has held the professorship in Landscape Architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Malmö. Diedrich has switched several times in her career between professional practice and academic lecturing and research, and therefore consciously advocates transdisciplinary research that includes non-academic forms of knowledge as critical components in research. The priorities in her work include sustainable urban development and the development of theories and methods for transforming urban landscapes in the Anthropocene.

Dr Laura Kemmer studied Political Science and International Relations in Berlin, Hamburg and Madrid. She completed her doctorate on Infrastructure, Affect and New Forms of Urban Collectivity at HafenCity University Hamburg. Most recently, she was a visiting lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a postdoc researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Technische Universität Berlin. Kemmer conducts her research and lectures at the interface between urban anthropology and human geography. Her positions in Berlin also involved her working in Hamburg, at the University of Vienna and for UN-Habitat in Rio de Janeiro. Together with colleagues in Berlin and Brazil, Laura Kemmer has created two research projects that will shape her academic work in the Martius Professorship over the years to come: ‘Designing with the Planet. Connecting riparian zones of struggle in São Paulo, Jakarta, and Berlin’ and ‘Re-Scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet’.

The Walter Gropius Professorship

This professorship at Argentina’s largest university is named after the German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus movement. It is interdisciplinary and interdepartmental in nature. It enables German academics and researchers to spend up to five years freely developing and deepening their subject specialisations in research and teaching at one of the most important architecture faculties in Latin America, which has over 25,000 students. The DAAD has used funding from the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) to finance the Walter Gropius Professorship since 2001, with the aim of strengthening academic relationships in Argentina and the Latin American countries. Academics and researchers from the fields of politics, cultural studies, history and architecture have taught and conducted research at the University of Buenos Aires since this professorship was inaugurated.

The Martius Professorship

This professorship is named after Carl Philipp von Martius, the German naturalist, ethnographer and traveller to Brazil. It assumes an important role in the academic cooperation between Germany and Latin America’s largest country. The professorship was initiated at the Faculty of Philosophy, Humanities and Literature at the University of São Paulo in 2007. It initially concentrated on German studies and European studies. It was renamed in 2021 as the German-Brazilian Martius Professorship for Humanities and Sustainable Development, which places greater emphasis on its interdisciplinary research into sustainability.

Please direct any questions to:

Sybilla Tinapp
Head of Scholarship Programmes Latin America – ST31
+49 228 882-8631
tinapp@daad.de

Media Contact:

Michael Flacke
Head of Press Office / Press Officer – SB03
DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service
+49 228 882-454
presse@daad.de

SOURCE: DAAD