April 06, 2016 | News

New MaxNetAging Coordinator

On April 1, Beatrice Michaelis took over as head of the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging (MaxNetAging). The 36-year-old came from the “Young Academy” in Berlin, where she worked as a research coordinator.

Beatrice Michaelis grew up on the island of Rügen. She studied anglistics/americanistics and older German literature at Humboldt University, Berlin, and received her PhD in medieval German literature. Subsequently, she was a postdoc at Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, and at the same time research coordinator of the doctoral school “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture”. The school is supported by the German Excellence Initiative.

In 2014, she returned to Berlin to work at the “Young Academy”. The “Young Academy” is a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. It was founded in 2000 to give young researchers the opportunity to help shape the academic system. Beatrice Michaelis coordinated, inter alia, the interdisciplinary working groups.

In her own research, Beatrice Michaelis looked at many different fields: She is interested in literature of the high and late middle ages, gender and queer studies, postcolonial theory in medieval studies, intersectionality, narratology, historical emotion research, and the  history of science.

“I find interdisciplinary research very exciting and important, especially when dealing with the big societal challenges we are facing today. So I'm looking forward to my new job and to working in the interdisciplinary environment of MaxNetAging”, says Michaelis.

The Max Planck International Research Network on Aging (MaxNetAging) is a virtual institute supporting research into the causes, patterns, and processes of aging. MaxNetAging researchers come from various disciplines, ranging from anthropology to art history to mathematics to educational research.