ANU Australian Studies Institute Director, Professor Paul Pickering, has joined the international advisory board of the Academy in Exile.

The Academy in Exile (AiE) is an institutional platform currently based in Berlin and Essen, as a joint initiative of:

• the Turkish Studies Department at the Universität Duisburg-Essen,
• the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities / KWI) in Essen,
• the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien,
• and the Freie Universität Berlin.

The AiE’s overarching aim is to forge new ways of responding to the threats posed to institutions of higher learning by populism, the curtailment of free speech, religious extremism, the spread of disinformation, and the state-sponsored persecution of scholars.

AiE supports scholars from across the globe, who are at risk in their countries of origin due to the character of their scholarly work and/or civil society activities, and it gives them an opportunity to continue their work in Germany via a fellowship program.

The Academy is formally linked to an extensive network of preeminent institutions of higher learning around the world. These include the famous ‘University in Exile’ (later Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science) at the New School in New York, which was established in 1933 to provide a safe intellectual home for scholars fleeing the growing threat of Nazism in Europe.

Professor Pickering said that he is honored to accept an invitation to join the Board and to help to further cement a relationship between the Academy and the Australian Studies Institute and the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at ANU.

‘There is a growing and palpable threat to academic freedom the world over and it is our obligation, both as scholars and citizens, to stand against’, he said.

Learn more about the Academy in Exile

Professor Paul Pickering attended the Academy in Exile’s Second Annual International Conference, Dire Times: Critical Thinking Then and Now, January 16-17, 2020.

His presentation “Profit or Loss: Is the Academy on Sale?”  was part of the Infringements on Academic Freedom session.