Chairs

Jörg Plath (G), born 1960 in Braunschweig. After completing training to become a bookseller he studied Modern German Literature, History and Politics in Freiburg, Vienna and Berlin. In 1993 he was awarded his doctorate on Franz Hessel and he now works as a journalist and literature critic for national media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and  Deutschlandradio Kultur. Jörg Plath lives in Berlin.

Insa Wilke (G), born in 1978, studied German Studies and History in Göttingen, Rome and Berlin. In 2009 she completed her PhD in Modern German Literature. Since 2009 she has worked as an academic assistant at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology at the Free University Berlin. In 2010 she became programme director at the Literaturhaus in Cologne. She writes as a literature critic for DIE ZEIT, die Frankfurter Rundschau and ZEITonline, amongst others.

Claudia Dathe (G), born in 1971, studied Translation Studies (Russian & Polish) in Leipzig and Pjatigorsk (Russia) and Krakow. From 1997 to 2004 she was an editor with the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. During her stay in Kiev she acquired Ukrainian and began to write her own literary translations. Since her return she has worked as a freelance translator for Ukrainian and Russian and hold seminars for German and Ukrainian young translators. Claudia Dathe has translated the Ukrainian authors Serhiy Zhadan, Olexandr Irwanez, Tanja Maljartschuk and Viktor Neborak, among others, into German. Since 1 April 2009 she has coordinated the project “Literary Translation” at the University of Tübingen. 

Uwe Dathe (G), born in 1962, studied Philosophy, Logic and Romanian Studies in Leipzig. After completing his PhD on Gottlob Frege in 1992 he has worked as an academic assistant in various projects at the Universities of Leipzig, Jena and the TU Braunschweig, from 1993 to 2000 and since 2006. From 2000 to 2005 he was an editor with the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Kiev. For many years he has focused on the indexing and presentation of bequests and is presently working at the University and State Library of Thuringia in Jena on the bequest of the politician Clemens von Delbrück (1856-1921).

Jenny Friedrich-Freksa (G), born in 1974, studied Social & Economic Communication at the Arts School Berlin. After lengthy stays abroad in Paris, Geneva and Rome she worked for the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. Since 2005 she has been the editor-in-chief of the Kulturaustausch magazine in Berlin. 

Katharina Narbutovic (D), born in Berlin, studied Political Science and Slavonic Studies. Initially she worked in the programme section of the Literature Colloquium Berlin, then until the end of 2005 she supervised the Central and East European literature division at the DuMont literature and art publishers. She is an editor, publicist and a project manager as well as a translator from Russian (Michail Saltykow-Schtschedrin and Michail Soschtschenko among others) and from Belorussian (authors such as Valzhyna Mort and Andrei Dynko). In winter 2007 a dossier on contemporary Belorussian poetry compiled by Narbutoviv together with Valzhyna Mort was published in the magazine die horen. Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik. Since 2008 she has directed the Berlin artists' programme at the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).