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Conrad Naber, one of Bremen’s great patrons for science and culture, continues his generous, long-standing support for Jacobs University: His Conrad Naber Foundation now provides 500,000 euros for establishing and funding the new "Conrad Naber Chair for European Plurilingualism“ over a five-year period. Starting in August 2008 the holder of the new chair will be Prof. Dr. Jürgen Trabant, currently Professor of Romance Philology at the Free University of Berlin.
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Aug
14, 2007]
By funding the initial establishment of the new named chair the Conrad Naber Foundation aims at supporting Jacobs University’s academic profile of intercultural research and teaching. Therefore an important task within the chair’s activities will be the development of an intelligent multilingual system for on-campus research, teaching, and living, which is especially tailored the university’s student body currently representing 90 nations and using English as primary capus language. By further developing intercultural competences the newly developed concepts will be designed to optimize the graduates' social and cultural integration within Europe. The chair’s research will focus on the topic of “Transforming Societies, Cultures, and Institutions – Aspects of Globalization”. Upon completion of the period funded by the Conrad Naber Foundation Jacobs University will maintain the chair with its own resources.
„The ‚Conrad Naber Chair for European Plurilingualism’ is an excellent opportunity to further strengthen our international and transcultural academic profile. We are immensely grateful for Conrad Naber’s generous support, which has accompanied the university encouragingly ever since its founding," says Jacobs University's president Joachim Treusch on the occasion of the donation.
The Bremen entrepreneur Conrad Naber, who recently celebrated his 85th birthday, is Jacobs University’s first supporter, who continuously has been contributing financial and material support as well as good counsel and the raising of further support from others. He started his ongoing commitment in 1998, even before the university was officially founded as International University Bremen (IUB) by donating a whole office floor in downtown Bremen as headquarters for IUB’s founding team. In 2002 he established the Conrad Naber IUB Foundation endowed with one million euros to further the development of the young private university. In honor of the patron’s commitment Jacobs University’s largest lecture hall has been named “Conrad Naber Lecture Hall”. The Conrad Naber Foundation, that now provided the funding for the new chair on European plurilingualism, was founded in 2000 and generally supports science as well as culture in the region of Bremen.
"The Conrad Naber Chair will be a wonderful if challanging opportunity to further develop my theoretical concept of an appropriate equilibrium of Europe’s cultural wealth in languages and the use of one universal world language, which then can be practically implemented to Jacobs University’s multicultural campus community. I feel greatly honoured by this new task and I am very much looking forward to it,” says Jürgen Trabant about his future post.
Jürgen Trabant'sspecial fields of interest are French and Italian linguistics, semiotics, esp. literary semiotics, history of European linguistic thought, philosophy of language, historical anthropology, and language politics. He 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. His academic career led him to the universities of Bari, Rome, Tübingen and Hamburg as well as the pedagogical university of Berlin before he assumed his current position at the FU Berlin in 1980. He held several positions as visiting professor, at Stanford University, the University of California in Davis, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris as well as the Université de Limoges, amongst others. The author of more than 250 scientific publications is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and holds the French “Ordre National du Mérite”.
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