Currently, I teach and conduct reasearch in Historical Pedagogy and Educational Research at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU). My ambition and research focus is to make the invisible of history visible: the female thinkers and non-European educators and pedagogues. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the goal is to bring them out of oblivion and into the light of day. Other focal points of my research are the anthropological foundations of pedagogy and the inclusion of politics, ethics and economics. The latter results not least from my biography: My career so far has led me via economics and philosophy into pedagogy.
I began my academic education by studying business administration. Early on, I became interested in the public sector, or more precisely, in non-profit organizations. I completed my first internship in this area as part of a consulting project. I find non-profit organizations so interesting because these institutions and organizations deal with projects of high social relevance. That's why I chose a topic from this field for my final thesis in business administration. It was called "Familienstiftung versus gemeinnützige Stiftungen" ("Family foundation versus charitable foundations") and dealt, among other things, with the question of what motivates people to use their own assets for the good and benefit of the general public, society.
I realized that the importance of charities in general was growing. For example, very large charitable foundations, family foundations and associations have now developed, some of which are active internationally, and which make a public contribution, take on responsibility and in this way bring about change. This is where the question of accountability comes in. And so it was that I spent much of my working life to date in consulting. My interest in the people behind such initiatives and who sustain these organizations remained and sparked my interest in philosophy.
The urge for practical relevance in my work, which had set me on this path, was at the same time responsible for setting me on a new one. For within economics, questions of ethics, responsibility, law and justice do not find sufficient space - although these should guide practice. At that time, I did not understand many things, many things remained mysterious, and only much later can one speak of an increase in knowledge.
My work in pedagogy today is based on many years of study of ethics and ancient philosophy, first and foremost with the greatest thinker in our history: Aristotle. I had the privilege to listen to him in my first lecture at the Munich School of Philosophy (HFPH). His clear, structured, millennia-old thoughts and their continuation, for example, in Hannah Arendt, unmatched highlight the creative potential of a political community. But in order to raise this potential, to enable citizens to shape ethics, politics and economics as well as their own lives in a mature and courageous way, education and Bildung are essential.
I pursued this conviction in my dissertation on Aristotle's virtue of megalopsychia, in which not only the individual and society are conceived together, but an implied ideal of education is found.
I liked this idea that my mission must be to participate in the formation of these personalities. At Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, I took over from Prof. Elisabeth Zwick in 2019, focusing on historical pedagogy.
In teaching and research, I try to break down the traditional boundaries of our discipline by emphasizing women and non-European pedagogy in the history of pedagogy, for example. If you are interested in my work, I invite you to listen to, say, one of my podcasts on historical pedagogy (the podcasts are only available in german)!