Benno Werlen was appointed holder of the UNESCO-Chair in May 2018. From 1997 to 2018, he held the Chair of Social Geography at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has researched and taught geography at the Universities of Fribourg, Kiel, Zurich, Cambridge, Salzburg, Geneva, Nijmegen, and at the ETH Zurich. Benno Werlen is the founder and executive director of the International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU)External link, which the three global science bodies of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities proclaimed in 2016. He has served as a member of the European Research Council (ERC) and advisor to the World Cultural Forum Taihu. In 2016, he was awarded the International Geographical Union's Lauréat d'HonneurExternal link for his scientific lifetime achievement. In his research, Benno Werlen focuses on the theory and methodology of geography, globalization, and the regionalization of everyday geography, societal relationships with space, place images and urban/regional development, cultural dimensions of geographical practices, global sustainability, as well as political regionalism and nationalism.
Team
About
Elisabeth Geursen will start the position as project lead on July 1st, 2023. She holds degrees in translation, German and English studies. She worked as a lecturer at the Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg, at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Mannheim, at Macquarie University in Sydney and at the University of Mannheim. She had also relevant positions in the private sector, e.g. at a financial service provider in London, in a boutique investment bank in Sydney and at a leading accounting firm in Frankfurt.
In her PhD thesis, Geursen shows the link between a sustainable HR management and successful business practice. Hereby, she bridges the gap between applied linguistics and business. In her position as project coordinator, Geursen can build on her multiple and international work experiences as well as her commitment to academia – recently as Personal Advisor to the President of the University of Mannheim.
