A preliminary decision has been made on the new university management of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder): A selection committee has proposed the Eastern Europe historian Philipp Ther as the only candidate for the upcoming presidential election, as the university announced on Tuesday. A new election is pending because the current president, the political scientist Julia von Blumenthal, will move to the top of the Humboldt University in Berlin in October 2022.
Ther is no stranger to Frankfurt, from 2002 to 2007 he was a junior professor at the Viadrina. From there he was appointed to a professorship for European history at the European University Institute in Florence.
Since 2010, Ther has been a professor for the history of East Central Europe at the University of Vienna, where he founded the research center for the history of transformations and is deputy head of the research platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe”.
His research focuses on the transformations since the 1980s, migration and flight in Europe. In 2015 he was awarded the non-fiction book prize at the Leipzig Book Fair for “The New Order on the Old Continent”.
An election date at the Viadrina has not yet been set, but it is planned for the fall, they say.