Peter Gänßler Award

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.

Biennial Conference of AAvhF and NZAvHF

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.

Nancy November elected Ngā Ahurei Fellow

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.

New office holders for NZ Association of von Humboldt Fellows

The new president of the NZ Association of von Humboldt Fellows is Professor Jörg Frauendiener from the the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago. Jörg is a professor of applied mathematics with particular research interests in general relativity. For a more detailed profile, see here.

The new vice-president is Professor Nancy November from the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland. Nancy’s discipline is musicology, her research centers on chamber music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a more detailed profile, see here.

NZ Humboldt Association Research Award to Professor Rod Downey

The recipient of the NZ Association of von Humboldt Fellows Research Award was announced on 19th November 2022 at the joint biennial Australia – New Zealand meeting of von Humboldt Fellows. It is Professor Rod Downey from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at VUW.  Rod’s interests are in mathematical logic and aspects of complexity; he is one of the founders of the field of parameterized complexity.  Details of his many distinctions can be found here.

The award consists of a cash payment and a certificate. We gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of this award by our founding president Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger.

Humboldt Research Award for Gaven Martin

We are delighted to report that in October 2022 Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin from the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study at Massey University received a Humboldt Research Award. His host is Prof. Dr. Walter Bergweiler at Kiel.   

Gaven’s research interests include Geometric Analysis, Low dimensional topology and geometry, and nonlinear PDEs. Details of Gaven’s many distinctions can be found here.