Vice President for Diversity and International Affairs

This area of responsibility was newly created on October 1, 2020. The Vice-President for Diversity and International Affairs leads the university-wide efforts at increasing our strengths in both of these fields and implementing long-term institutional frameworks.

The Vice-President for Diversity and International Affairs is responsible for:

• increasing the visibility and appreciation of people’s individual and cultural diversity, as part of the university’s global responsibility;
• promoting a university-wide dialog about how to create a bias-free working environment for everyone, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, physical and mental ability, age, or world view;
• creating a central diversity office at the university.
• strategically developing Bamberg University’s international partnerships and networks;
• repositioning the International Office as the central administrative agency for the university’s institutional alliances, research contacts, and study programs around the world;
• formulating an overarching long-term internationalization strategy to coordinate the university’s international policies, research networks, teaching and administrative activities through a comprehensive common vision.

Prof. Dr. Christine Gerhardt

Christine Gerhardt is vice president for diversity and international affairs and professor of American Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany.

Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities, especially in connection with migration and mobility studies, on intersections between critical race studies, postcolonial studies, und ecocriticism, and on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. She is the author of A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World (2014), and of a monograph on the Reconstruction period in American novels (Rituale des Scheiterns: Die Reconstruction-Periode im amerikanischen Roman, 2002), editor of the Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century (2018), and co-editor of Environmental Imaginaries on the Move (special issue, 2016) and Religion in the United States (2011).She is currently analyzing the intersections between climate change, mobility, and visuality in Katrina poetry; a different project explores the place of horticulture in Whitman’s mobile ecopoetics.

Christine Gerhardt holds a degree in English, American, and German Studies from Humboldt University (1. Staatsexamen, 1993) and an M.A. in English Language and Literature from Ohio University (1998). She completed her doctoral studies (Ph.D. 2000) and her habilitation (venia legendi “American Studies” 2008) at the University of Dortmund, and was a visiting scholar at Emory University, Iowa University, and Northwestern University. After serving as a professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg (2008, interim), she was director of the German-American Institute /Carl-Schurz-Haus Freiburg (2008-2010), before coming to Bamberg. In 2015, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Contact

Kapuzinerstraße 16
96047 Bamberg
Telefon: 0951/863-1006
vp.div-in@uni-bamberg.de

Personal Assistant to the Vice-President for Diversity and International Affairs

Johanna Feier
An der Universität 5
96047 Bamberg
Telefon: 0951/863-1329
johanna.feier(at)uni-bamberg.de

Assistant of the Vice-President

Michaela Christa
Kapuzinerstraße 16
96047 Bamberg
Telefon: 0951/863-1003
michaela.christa(at)uni-bamberg.de