Professor em. Dr. Jürgen Trabant
Jürgen Trabant studied Romance and German Philology as well as Philosophy at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main, Paris, and Tübingen, where he completed his PhD in Romance Philology in 1969. In 1980 he became professor of Linguistics (C4) at the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Free University Berlin, where he was head of the Center for French Studies until 2004 and has been a member of the Interdisciplinary Center “Historical Anthropology” since 1987.
He has held several positions as visiting professor: at Stanford University, the University of California in Davis, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Universities of Leipzig, Limoges, Bologna, Brasília and Milan. In addition, he has been a fellow at the Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study, a member of the Historischen Kollegs München, and from 2003 to 2008 he has been the rector of the Studienkolleg zu Berlin.
Trabant is an Emeritus Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), of which he was a founding member in 1992. From 2008 to 2013 he held the “Conrad Naber Chair for European Plurilingualism” at the Jacobs University Bremen.
In 1998, he was appointed “Officier de l’ordre national du mérite” and in 2004 “Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres”. These French distinctions were followed in 2011 by the Commendatore nell’Ordine al merito della Repubblica italiana. Since 2012 he has been an Extraordinary Member of the Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti (Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche) in Naples.
Currently he is a member of the research group Symbolic Articulation. Language and Image between Action and Schema (VolkswagenStiftung) at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.