President
Prof. Dr. Katharina Lorenz has been President of Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) since 1 April 2024. This is the first time a woman has headed JLU.
Prof. Lorenz, born in 1974, is from Berlin. She studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History and Greek Philology at the Free University of Berlin, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and at the University of Heidelberg, where she received her doctorate in 2002. She then worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Classical Archaeology at JLU. From 2005 to 2018, she taught at the University of Nottingham, UK, most recently as a professor, and was the founding director of a centre for digital humanities there.
Since April 2018, she has held the Chair of Classical Archaeology at JLU's Department 04 - History and Cultural Studies and been Director of the Giessen Collection of Classical Antiquities.
Her academic interest lies in images and visual language: In her research, Prof. Lorenz Her focuses on the functioning of ancient image cultures, for example in the portrait practice of the Roman Empire, and on the implications of digital technologies for the production of knowledge in the humanities.