Alexander Woell

Alexander Wöll (born June 30, 1968 in Kempten (Allgäu) ) is a German Slavist and university professor. From December 2014 to January 2018 he was President of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) . Since the beginning of 2018 he has been working as a professor for culture and literature of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Potsdam .

Life

After attending primary school in Durach and the humanistic Carl-von-Linde-Gymnasium in Kempten , Wöll studied German (with a focus on comparative literature), history and Slavic studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , the Humboldt University in Berlin and from 1988 to 1994 the Moscow State Linguistic University .

In 1997 , Wöll received his doctorate from the LMU Munich with a dissertation on the subject of “Doppelganger. Stone monument, mirror writing and usurpation in Russian literature ”. He then worked as a research assistant and was from 2003 to 2004 with a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Charles University in Prague . After his habilitation on Jakub Deml's life and work at the University of Regensburg, he taught and researched there as a private lecturer . From 2007 to 2008 he was a “Lecturer” for Czech, Slovak and Russian philology (language, culture, literature) at Oxford University . He turned down an offer at the Scottish University of St Andrews in 2008 and instead accepted a professorship at the Philosophical Faculty of the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald in the same year . Wöll has been Dean of the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Greifswald since 2010. Re-elected in 2012, his re-election as dean in 2014 was unsuccessful.

On September 15, 2014, Wöll was elected the new President of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He succeeds Gunter Pleuger , whose term of office ends on September 30, 2014. The official appointment took place on December 3, 2014.

On October 20, 2017, Wöll announced that he would like to work as a scientist again and therefore resigned from the presidency on January 1, 2018. The previous Vice President Stephan Kudert took over the position in January 2018.

Research and Teaching

His focus areas include the comparison of Russian and Western European literature, the Czech writer Jakub Deml in the context of mysticism in Central and Eastern Europe, Miron Białoszewski and Polish poetry in the 20th century as well as Czech, Russian, Polish and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian poetry and prose from the turn of the century and the present.