New appointments to the Board of Trustees: Alexis von Poser becomes Deputy Director of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art of the National Museums in Berlin
Press release from 07/04/2019
The Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, chaired by Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, unanimously decided on Tuesday that Dr Alexis von Poser should take over the position of Deputy Director of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art.
The Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art of the National Museums in Berlin will present non-European cultures in the Humboldt Forum from 2020. In May 2018, the management of the two museums was merged and Prof. Dr Lars-Christian Koch was appointed Director. Dr von Poser has now been elected as his deputy. The majority of the collections of the two museums will remain in Dahlem, where they will form the Dahlem Research Campus together with the Museum of European Cultures and the Institute for Museum Research of the National Museums in Berlin as well as other partners.
Dr Alexis von Poser studied ethnology, medieval and modern history and English language and literature at the universities of Heidelberg and Manchester (UK). Since 2014, he has been curator and head of the Department of Ethnology at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover. He has also held teaching positions at various universities for many years, most recently at the Institute of Ethnology in Göttingen.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, says: "Mr von Poser is excellently qualified for the advertised position, he brings with him important experience from various projects in Oceania, Asia and Africa and thus has a rare breadth of expertise. His ideas on the current debates on provenance research and cooperation with countries and societies of origin have convinced us that he is ideally suited to further develop the Dahlem Research Campus together with Mr Koch and to set important accents in the Humboldt Forum from there."
"As a research campus, Dahlem is to become an international centre for object-based research, integrated into an active global network of museum and university institutions. It should communicate this to the public and also give members of cultures of origin natural access to the material legacies of their ancestors," says Dr von Poser. According to him, the campus should contribute to a better understanding of current processes of globalisation and social pluralisation.
Alexis von Poser was already employed at the Institute of Ethnology at Heidelberg University for several years during his studies. He was awarded his doctorate there in 2009 with "summa cum laude" for his thesis on concepts of space, time and people. He can look back on extensive field research experience in Papua New Guinea and worked as a librarian at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law while working on his doctorate. He was also a doctoral fellow at the interdisciplinary Marsilius Kolleg at the University of Heidelberg and then a post-doctoral research fellow as part of the project "Human Image and Human Dignity".
After completing his doctorate, Dr von Poser worked on an exhibition project at the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich and the South Sea Museum in Obergünzburg. From 2010 to 2012, he worked as a scientific museum assistant in advanced training at the Ethnological Museum of the National Museums in Berlin, where he was involved in the conception and development of various exhibitions. He then headed the digitisation project at the Ethnological Museum of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck. From 2013 to 2014, he was employed as a lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin.
At the Landesmuseum Hannover, where he has been head of the Department of Ethnology since 2014, Dr von Poser is responsible for the ethnological section of the new permanent exhibition "Menschenwelten". With "Heikles Erbe. Colonial Traces to the Present Day", he curated the first major special exhibition on the topic of provenance research into colonial-era collections. He maintains co-operations and exchange projects with national and international universities, museums and artists (e.g. in South Africa, Shanghai, Ghana, Tanzania, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Hawai`i) and is involved in interdisciplinary discourse between humanities scholars and natural scientists. He has also dealt with restitution issues and in 2018 was a co-applicant in the state-wide joint project "Provenance Research in Non-European Collections and Ethnology in Lower Saxony" (PAESE), within which he also heads the sub-project of the Landesmuseum Hannover.
In future, Alexis von Poser would like to use the collections in Dahlem to provide further impetus for broad national and international cooperation on topics relevant to the future and to expand collaboration with the university. In addition, von Poser wants to expand the research campus together with Dahlem partner institutions as a showcase for the local population, e.g. as part of the Long Night of Science.