New Professors at UWA

27 January 2025

Photo: Henning/Kara/Schneider/Weiß

Four professors are joining the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts, bringing expertise in four very different research areas: Barbara Henning in Turkish Studies, Cem Kara in Alevi Studies, Julia Schneider in Chinese Studies, and Agnes Weiß in Microbiology.

A research programme such as that of the CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence UWA – the study of written artefacts from all cultures and periods from antiquity to the present – can only be put into practice if researchers from a wide range of disciplines combine their respective expertise. In particular, UWA thrives on the diverse knowledge of its members in the so-called ‘small subjects’ in the humanities. The cluster’s material-focused approach also makes the collaboration of researchers from various fields of natural science indispensable. In total, researcher from over 40 academic disciplines are involved in UWA’s research.

Recently, four new professors have joined the cluster, each contributing to a significant expansion of the research expertise bundled in UWA. Their professional backgrounds illustrate in a nutshell the diversity of research on written artefacts in Hamburg.

Barbara Henning is a Professor of Turkish Studies. Before coming to Hamburg in October 2020, she was an assistant professor of the history of Islam in the eastern Mediterranean at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She completed her doctoral thesis, Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes, in Bamberg in 2017. Her research interests are in the areas of Ottoman-Kurdish history, the history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, imperial elites, the politics of identity and memory, self-narrative research, and the history of knowledge and terminology.

Cem Kara is a Professor of Alevi theology. Previously, he had been a postdoc in the Department of Alevi Theological Studies at the University of Vienna since 2018. He studied at the University of Cologne to become a teacher of history and philosophy, and later completed a doctorate in the history of Eastern and Southern Europe at LMU Munich with a dissertation on Border-crossing dervishes. Cultural relations of the Bektashi order, 1826–1925. Today, he mainly researches the history, textual sources, and theology of Alevism as well as Sufism in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world.

Julia Schneider has been appointed as Professor of Chinese Studies in 2024 as the successor to Baren ter Haar. She completed her doctorate in Göttingen and, after further positions in Ghent and Göttingen again, was most recently Senior Lecturer at University College Cork. Her research covers a broad range of Chinese history from the 12th to the 20th century, and often focuses on non-Chinese peoples. She is particularly interested in the analysis of historical narratives, the history of ideas and thought, non-Chinese identities and ethnic minorities, as well as censorship and book culture.

Agnes Weiß has been Professor of Microbiology at the University of Hamburg since 2022 and is now also involved in UWA. She studied food and biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, where she subsequently completed her doctorate on the Isolation and characterisation of probiotically relevant micro-organisms from the human and animal intestinal tract. She works with all types of microorganisms that are found on food or that are added to food during its production. She is particularly interested in how microorganisms interact with food and what this interaction does to the microorganisms themselves and how it affects their properties. At UWA, she is expanding the expertise in the Artefact Lab. For example, she was involved in the investigation of Islamic manuscripts from an important collection in Kairouan, Tunisia, to elucidate mysterious parchment damage that spreading throughout the collection.