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Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Visiting Chair of Australian Studies

The English Department at the FU Berlin now hosts the "Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Visiting Chair of Australian Studies". 

This chair is funded by the DAAD and sponsored also by the Australian Embassy in Berlin. The Hirschfeld-Mack Chair exists to further academic exchange between Australia and Germany, to supplement the teaching offers of the department by importing distinguished researchers from overseas universities, and to make a substantial contribution to the internationalization of the German university system. A different incumbent will take up the chair each semester from 2008-2012. The Hirschfeld-Mack Chair also reinforces the already strong focus upon Australian Studies and Postcolonial Studies within the English department.

The Chair is named after Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (born 1893 in Frankfurt am Main, died 1965 in Sydney). Hirschfeld-Mack was a member of the Bauhaus movement who immigrated to Britain in 1936 before being transported to Australia  as an "enemy alien" in 1940. After a period of internment at Tatura, he became Head of Art at the prestigious Geelong Grammar School and via his teaching exercised a major influence on postwar Australian art and design. The Chair is named after him, with the permission of his family, to stress the interdisciplinary brief of its teachers, their committment to the role of culture in the public sphere, and the central transcultural German-Australian aspect of the project. 

Incumbent WiSe 2009/2010:

Professor Philip Mead holds the Chair in Australian Literature (Australia’s second second dedicated appointment in this area) at the University of Western Australia. He is the former Coordinator of English at the University of Tasmania and Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. He was also poetry editor of the prestigious quarterly magazine Meanjin

Professor Mead has recently completed a monograph study of Australian poetry Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008). He is currently completing an edited collection of statements in Australian poetics (with John Kinsella, Universityof Western Australia/Cambridge University).

For courses offered at the FU Berlin in WiSe 2009/2010 by Prof. Mead  please klick here.

For a list of and further information on former and current professors holding the Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Visiting Chair of Australian Studies please see here.