Michael Wedekind


History of South-Central Europe

  • main topics

    ◦  Modern history of South-Central and Southeast Europe

        (Austria, Germany, Italy, Romania, former Yugoslavia)


    ◦  Regional history of the Alpine-Adriatic region


    ◦  Ethnic conflicts


    ◦  Historical demography


    ◦  History of humanities


    ◦  History of recreation and leisure


    ◦  Mountain studies


    ◦  Protection and looting of cultural assets

Michael  Wedekind

The ›Self‹ and the ›Other‹ — ›the Germans‹ and their European neighbors: To this subject I have devoted my attention since my academic beginnings. It drove my interest in History and European philologies.

Born in Bremen (Germany), I studied History, Romance philology, and Education at the Universities of Münster (Germany), Perugia and Bologna (Italy), and Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca (Romania).

In later years, I frequented Portuguese language courses at the University of Algarve in Faro (Portugal). I also have a basic knowledge of minor Romance languages, such as Rhaeto-Romance and Ladin, spoken, respectively, in the Grisons (Switzerland) and the Dolomites (Italy). Linguistic and cultural interests going beyond the Romance area led me to study Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, and Slovene.

I obtained my PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Münster where, subsequently, I was a postdoctoral researcher.

I have been a research assistant at the University of Trento (Italy) and an assistant professor at the Universities of Münster and Vienna (Austria), where I taught Contemporary History. I was a visiting professor in Trento (Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico) and a guest professor at the Universities of Bucharest and Trento. In 2016, I became a senior researcher at the Central Institute of Art History (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte) in Munich (Germany). Among the many institutional partners with which I have been co-operating, the long lasting collaboration with the Trento based Museo Storico Foundation stands out for intensity and continuance.

I have translated academic and literary texts from French, English and German into Italian, as well as from Romanian and Italian into German.

Finally, I also look back at nearly three decades as a spare-time teacher of Italian and Romanian languages and literatures in the field of adult education.