President
Professor Helene Harth President
Helene Harth studied Classical Philology, German Studies, and Romance Studies in Frankfurt am Main, Tübingen, and Florence and qualified as a professor with a three-volume critical edition of the letters of the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, published by Olschki. She held professorships in Romance Philology at the universities of Passau and Saarbrücken and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, founded the Institute for Romance Studies at the University of Potsdam as the acting president of the German Association of Romance Scholars. She subsequently served as the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and as the Vice Rector for Development Planning and Finance at the University of Potsdam. From 1997 to 2003, she was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities. From 2001 to 2003, she served as the first elected president of the Franco-German University in Saarbrücken. Since 2005, she has been chairing the selection committee of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and is a member of the board of trustees. Since 2009, she has held a permanent visiting professorship at the Institute for Italian Culture and Literature at the University of Szczecin.
Her scholarly publications and research interests concern French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, but above all, in addition to Italian Renaissance literature, contemporary Italian literature and culture, as well as postcolonial literature in present-day Italy. She was the founder and long-time editor of the journal Zibaldone, which is dedicated to cultural exchanges between Germany and France.
Helene Harth has received numerous awards for her academic and cultural outreach work: the Premio Montecchio (for cultural mediation between Germany and Italy); the Premio Carlo Betocchi (for her scholarly work); the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs award for the journal "Zibaldone"; the "Chevalier" and "Officier des Palmes Académiques" orders (for her work in establishing and training East German French teachers at the University of Potsdam); and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs award for her translations and cultural mediation activities.