The AAvHF is holding an online celebration of Alexander von Humboldt’s birthday on 15 September 2023 at 6:30 pm (AEST). The event will feature an address by Dr Thomas Hesse, the Deputy Secretary General of the Humboldt Foundation.

The Australian Association of Alexander-von-Humboldt Felows has established the Peter Gänßler Fund. The aim of the Fund is to encourage and support intending AvHF postdoctoral fellowship applicants with worthy track records from a region whose researchers have previously had difficulty gaining access to AvHF schemes.

For more information, please refer to the AAvhF website here.

The 2024 biennial conference of the Australian and New Zealand Associations of von Humboldt Fellows will be hosted by the University of Otago in Dunedin and will take place on 15-17 November 2024. Please mark the dates!

As you are aware, the Biennial Conference of our Associations is a broad academic conference aiming to bring the sciences and humanities into conversation. Another aim is to showcase research and funding opportunities in Germany.

NZ AvHF vice president Nancy November was elected as a Fellow to the Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in this year’s selection. Congratulations, Nancy.

Nancy November is among the most innovative and eminent figures in the field of musicology. Combining interdisciplinarity and cultural history, her research centres on chamber music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probing questions of historiography, canonisation, and genre. Her work in historical musicology achieves impact through deepening knowledge, critical thinking, and challenging the traditional view of music and its context. Through her work in critical pedagogy, she continually strives to help develop other peoples’ historical perspectives, skills and awareness—not just for the maximum impact of her own research, but to develop tomorrow’s ‘critical beings’. Her scholarship is based on an expansion and critique of the western classical musical canon, by means of multiple lenses: historiography, theory, gender studies, performance practice and aesthetics. Her work is recognised for challenging traditional pedagogies, grounded in western worldviews, with new, culturally-sustaining ways of teaching and learning history that are empowering, especially for Indigenous students.