WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production

The WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production was established in 2015 as an endowed chair with the help of the WÜRTH Foundation and the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft. Martin Tröndle has been holding the chair since then.

The chair’s research and teaching activities focus on cultural organisations and their visitors as well as non-visitors, cultural policies and funding, as well as on the effect different performance and exhibition formats have on their audiences. The close integration of research, teaching and practice is central to this work and at the core of the national and international research projects Martin Tröndle is carrying out with various teams and practice partners. These include:

• Martin Tröndle has been the principal investigator of “eMotion – mapping museum experience,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and others.
• He is a principal investigator of “ECR – Experimental Concert Research,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and others.
• He is the speaker of the research cluster “Arts Production and Cultural Policy in Transformation,” funded by Zeppelin University.
• Since 2014, Martin Tröndle has been editor-in-chief (together with Steffen Höhne and Constance DeVereaux) of the peer-reviewed Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy.

The research of the chair focuses on the following topics: Concert and museum studies, visitor and non-visitor research, cultural management and cultural policy research as well as artistic research.

The chair is hosting a range of dissertation projects and post-doctoral projects that explore the various thematic fields of the chair. The chair is also part of the doctoral programme "FEINART.

Throughout the courses offered by the chair, the approach of research-based learning is applied to encourage independent thinking and enthusiasm for scientific problem solving among students.

With the concept of research-based teaching, teaching is hybridised, with the keyword ‘transfer’ we aim to hybridise research. In order to make science effective, the designs and results of scientific research must move closer to society.

The WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production is part of the Center for Cultural Production at Zeppelin University, which also includes the Zeppelin University’s artsprogram and the Laboratory for Implicit and Artistic Knowledge (LIKWI).

Since 2019, Martin Tröndle is the speaker of the research cluster “Arts Production and Cultural Policy in Transformation (ACPT)”, which deals with the transformation of cultural production in the context of social change.

Martin Tröndle is a beneficiary of “FEINART – The Future of European Independent Art Spaces in a Period of Socially Engaged Art”, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme within the framework of Horizon 2020.