Arts Production and Cultural Policy in Transformation

Since 2015, Prof Dr Martin Tröndle has held the WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. His work deals with a large variety of topics, all revolving around the production, distribution, and reception of the arts. Tröndle was the principal investigator of eMotion – Mapping Museum Experience (2008–14), supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. eMotion experimentally analysed the experiences of museum-goers, looking primarily at the museum architecture, art objects, and curatorial design and how these effect and affect the behaviour of museum visitors. Tröndle is now principal investigator of Experimental Concert Research (2018–), supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and others, a project that experimentally analyses the concert experience. Since 2014, Tröndle has been Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement: Kunst, Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft / Journal of Cultural Management: Arts, Policy, Economics, and Society. Among others, he is the editor of the two-volume concert studies reader Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form (2011, 2nd ed.) and Das Konzert II: Beiträge zum Forschungsfeld der Concert Studies (2018).

Karen van den Berg is Professor of Art Theory and Curating at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. She studied art history, classical archaeology, and Nordic philology in Saarbrücken and Basel. Her doctoral thesis on Matthias Grünewald was supervised by Gottfried Boehm and received support through a Friedrich Naumann Foundation stipend. Van den Berg also earned the Max-Imdahl-Stipendium für Kunstvermittlung in 1994–96. From 1993 to 2003, she was a regular lecturer and research fellow for art history and theory at Witten/Herdecke University, and research stays and teaching posts have brought her to numerous internationally acclaimed institutions, including the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; Bauhaus University, Weimar; Parsons New School for Design, New York; and Europäisches Kolleg Jena. She was also a visiting scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University in California and a fellow at Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) in Weimar. Her research focuses on the theory and history of display, museums, educational architecture, art and politics, artistic epistemes, art market studies, and studio practice.

Udo Göttlich is Professor of General Media and Communication Studies at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. His main areas of work and research are media, communications and cultural sociology, reception and audience research, cultural studies approaches, theory of public sphere, and sociological theory.

Franz Schultheis is Senior Professor of Sociology of Art and Creative Industries at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. He received his doctorate from the University of Konstanz, followed by his habilitation at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, under Pierre Bourdieu. Prior to his professorship at Zeppelin University, Schultheis held posts at the universities of Neuchâtel, Geneva, and St. Gallen in Switzerland. He was also Research Councillor at the Swiss National Science Foundation (2000–10) and Vice President of the Swiss Science Council (2010–19), both in Bern, and has been President of the Bourdieu Foundation, St. Gallen, since 2007. Schultheis is a member of the editorial board of Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales; co-editor (with Stefan Egger) of Pierre Bourdieu’s collected writings, published by Suhrkamp; editor of the series Questions sociologiques, released by Edition L’Harmattan, Paris; and Vice President of the publisher Les Éditions Raisons d’Agir, Paris.

Constance DeVereaux is Associate Professor and Director of the MFA program Arts Leadership and Cultural Management at University of Connecticut. She studied political philosophy, public policy, and legal theory at Claremont Graduate University in the US, completing her doctorate with the thesis: Artist, Citizen, State: A Theory of Arts Policy. As a Fulbright Senior Specialist, she has provided expertise to universities, municipalities, and organisations in South Africa, Romania, and Finland on matters of cultural policy, cultural management, and culture-led development. She is a member of the international research team UNESCO and the Making of Global Cultural Policy funded by the Australian Research Council. She serves on the executive editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement: Kunst, Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft / Journal of Cultural Management: Arts, Policy, Economics, and Society.
Her research interests include culturally sustainable entrepreneurship, cultural hybridity, and the use of narrative for cultural policy analysis. Recent published works include Arts and Cultural Management: Sense and Sensibilities in the State of the Field and Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World. She has also published articles in Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, the Annals of Tourism, the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Kultūros Barai, and Philosophia.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Meike Lettau holds a Junior Professorship in Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, Germany. Her research interests include foreign cultural policy, international cultural relations, artists as agents of change, cultural activism, sociopolitical transformation processes and culture in conflict regions, among others.

She is currently leading the DAAD-funded project تواصل [Tawasol] Cultural Production and Policy Network, which investigates the socio-political dimensions of artistic formats between the WANA region and Germany, with 20 fellows from Germany, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Previously, she was academic associate at the Institute for Cultural Policy at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, and coordinator of the Graduate School ‘Performing Sustainability: Cultures and Development in West Africa’ which is implemented in cooperation with the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria, and the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. She has worked for various cultural institutions in Germany and abroad (Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Pune, KHOJ International Artists’ Association, ARThinkSouthAsia, Cultural Innovators Network (CIN), Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), Internationale Gesellschaft der bildenden Künste (IGBK), German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ)).

To Junior Professorship for Cultural and Media Policy Studies

Michèle Brand (*1989) is academic associate at the Chair of Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Zeppelin University. She is the academic coordinator of the DAAD-funded project "تواصل [Tawasol] - Cultural Production and Policy Network".

She completed her B.A. in Cultural Studies and French Philology at the University of Potsdam as well as a German-French M.A. in Cultural Mediation/Médiation Culturelle des Arts at the University of Hildesheim and Aix-Marseille Université (Marseille, France). She is currently pursuing her PhD on "Cultural work as crisis prevention in the context of foreign cultural policy taking the example of the Republic of Mali." From 2017 to 2022, Michèle Brand worked as research assistant at the Department of Cultural Policy at the University of Hildesheim. She was responsible for the implementation of a research cooperation with the Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Mali as well as and scientific support of the GIZ project "Donko ni Maaya - Crisis prevention and strengthening social cohesion through the promotion of the cultural sector in Mali". Prior to that she was program coordinator for the project ARTS RIGHTS JUSTICE to promote artistic freedom of expression and protection of persecuted artists, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. As part of her employment, she organized various research workshops and trainings with academic and civil society partners in Lebanon, Tunisia, Mali and Germany.

In addition to her academic activities, Michèle Brand worked as a freelancer in the fields of evaluation for the Grimmwelt Kassel and in project coordination for the non-profit association coculture e.V. in the support of and contact with artists at risk. As a CrossCulture scholarship holder of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, she worked with the cultural organizations Al Mawred Al Thaqafy and Action for Hope in Beirut (Lebanon) in 2017. She has also been training as a conflict mediator since 2022.

Christian Weining studied Communication and Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen and the University of Latvia in Riga. In his thesis and research work, he dealt with the literary field of listener typologies, the connection between philosophical and empirical models of aesthetic experience and analysed the field of empirical literature on the concert experience. In a research project on non-visitors of cultural institutions, which he developed and carried out with Prof. Dr. Martin Tröndle as part of a seminar, he analysed the visiting behaviour to cultural institutions of Berlin students (see publications).

From September 2017 to December 2018 he was a student assistant at the WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production, from October 2017 to June 2018 assistant at the Bodenseefestival and from June to August 2019 part of the concert organisation team of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Currently, he is working as project coordinator and research assistant for the interdisciplinary research project Experimental Concert Research (ECR), through which he is also completing his doctorate dissertation project.