The University of Michigan International Institute (II) is pleased to announce that Johannes von Moltke has agreed to serve as its interim director for the 2024-25 academic year.
Professor von Moltke was recently named the Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate Professor of German Studies and Film, Television, and Media. In 2020-21, he served as acting director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (WCEE), the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES), and the Center for European Studies (CES). Professor von Moltke’s research and teaching center on film and German cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies, as well as of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America. He has published widely on issues in German cinema, critical theory, and 20th-century German culture. During the Spring of 2024, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where he advanced his current project on the cultural politics of the new right from a transatlantic perspective.
Professor von Moltke looks forward to working with faculty, staff, and students across the entire range of the International Institute’s centers and activities. He comments,
Our commitments as an institution to global, regional, and transnational concerns, remain as vital as they’ve ever been. I am eager to work with everyone at the II to tap into the deep, broad, and diverse set of expertise that is housed across the centers, in our classrooms, among our faculty and staff. I’ve always been impressed with the II’s ability to bring that expertise to bear on complex social and political questions, on current events as they arise around the globe, and on humanist inquiry across borders and cultures. It’s a privilege to get to build on these strengths and help shape our collective work over the coming year.
I’m deeply grateful for Mary Gallagher’s dedicated and thoughtful leadership and I’m committed to carrying forward the momentum that she brought to the II as director.
He will serve as interim II director from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025.
