Barbara Winckler

Through its regular meetings and various formats, AGYA has given me the opportunity to build lasting relationships with colleagues from various disciplinary and regional backgrounds, allowing us to develop ideas for cooperation over a longer period of time.

As a ‘second generation’ AGYA member, I had the incredible opportunity to be involved in building the AGYA community and shaping its processes and procedures from the very start. Thinking beyond the limits of my usual professional life in a wide range of AGYA activities has been one of the most challenging but also rewarding experiences of AGYA membership. My favourite projects have included a 2016 cross-cultural translation workshop for students from Münster and Tunis, as well as an annual summer school for Arab and European Ph.D. students in Arabic Studies, which has been running since 2017, with  sessions held in Beirut, Rabat, and Venice. Two major conferences on ‘Migration and Transnational Cooperation in Higher Education’ (2016) and ‘The Place of Humanities in Research, Education and Society’ (2019) also allowed me to venture into the field of science policy, tackling topics of local and global relevance with Arab and German scholars, university officials and representatives of funding institutions. As an alumna, I will continue to co-organize the Arabic Studies summer school and am currently involved in the publication of the interdisciplinary AGYA volume Thinking Through Ruins.