Junior Professor Dr. Bopp-Filimonov
Interview
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Bopp-Filimonov
The Friedrich Schiller University Jena is one of the seven members of a consortium of European universities, together with the University ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ Iași in Romania. In the framework of that consortium, the University participates in a joint application in the new EU funding programme European Universities, with which European university partnerships are to be particularly strengthened. Junior professor Dr Valeska Bopp-Filimonov from the Institute of Romance Languages and Literature on the possibilities and chances of cooperation:
What will the advantages of such a cooperation in the EC2U consortium be?
The Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the University ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ Iași in Romania have been cooperating for many years. The intensified cooperation between the universities in the framework of EC2U is a logical and consistent continuation of precisely this cooperation. The university partnership will become more visible and give both universities an additional boost in internationalization. EC2U, i.e. the European Campus of City-Universities, will enable a significantly increased permeability and participation in teaching and research via a joint virtual campus—and thus offer even greater transparency among colleagues as to who is currently researching and working on what.
In terms of exchange, I find the planned short-term mobilities for students extremely interesting. It is invigorating and a great change to be able to attend even single courses organized in blocks at one of the partner universities during the current semester. This low-threshold contact possibility will certainly encourage many people to go abroad for a longer period. All this will in turn definitely have a positive effect on the attractiveness of our study programmes.
Especially for my subject area—Romanian Studies and Southeast European Studies—we are looking forward to imparting our contents to students of participating universities where this expertise cannot be provided. The EC2U consortium offers a completely new breadth of expertise in this area, as there is a much wider range of specialization on offer. This is great, but it also brings challenges: More than before, we have to offer teaching in other languages—beyond German and Romanian. More linguistic diversity and, at the same time, probably primarily English as the intermediary language—this is a compromise we will have to accept.
Excursion to Romania 09/2019
What can you tell us about the planned master's programme “European Languages and Cultures in Contact”?
The Friedrich Schiller University Jena is one of Germany's leading universities in the area of ‘rare subjects’, among them many philological and regional foci and a high level of expertise with regard to rare or endangered languages. I believe that transferring this language and cultural knowledge into a structured master’s programme that is visible across Europe and especially in the EC2U network is very attractive for the University, but also for interested students from all over Europe. At the same time, to link the exchange in teaching and research with the partners—as well as between Jena and Iași—even more closely and to be able to offer the students fixed exchange formats as well as cotutelle procedures, entails a high added value for everyone involved.
Since when have the universities of Jena and Iași been partner universities?
The partnership between the universities of Jena and Iași was concluded in 1960, as the first treaty of friendship between a university of the GDR and the Romanian People's Republic. The SED party newspaper then wrote: ‘that this treaty of friendship may serve the good of science and the achievement of the common goal, the construction of socialism’. This treaty of friendship was renewed regularly.
How lively was this partnership in the recent past?
First of all, the treaty from GDR times had to be redesigned after 1989. This was done on 8 July 1993 with the agreement on cooperation between the University A.I. Cuza Iași and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. In particular, this agreement includes cooperation in theoretical physics, classical philology, German studies and Romance studies.
The nice thing in practice is that we regularly have guest students of various subjects here—the International Office of the University of Iași is extremely active in placing students in Jena. At our University, in turn, students of very different subjects can specialize in Romania: very classically via the major or minor subject in Romance Studies, then as a core language in the interdisciplinary programme ‘Southeast European Studies’ and, more recently, also in the very young study programme ‘Business and Languages’. At the ‘Rumänien-Stammtische’, informal get-togethers organized on a regular basis, all these students then meet the Erasmus students from Romania—most of them actually are from Iași.
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Bopp-Filimonov
How is the scientific exchange structured?
As far as scientific exchange is concerned, I cannot speak for all subjects, but in the field of Romanian Studies there has been intensive contact over the last 20 years—especially in the area of linguistics, starting with the student exchange and ending with joint publications and conference contributions by my predecessor Prof. Wolfgang Dahmen with his colleague Eugen Munteanu, or the joint supervision of doctoral students. For a while there was a summer school ‘Romanian Language’ organized by the University of Iași. We recommended students as participants, so that their costs were covered by the Romanian Ministry of Education. Visiting scientists regularly spend up to three months researching in Jena regularly after applying via the DAAD. We integrate them in lecture evenings and in our teaching.
Finally, the university friendship was officially acknowledged at the event ‘Rumänientage –Zilele României – Romania Days’ in June 2014, which culminated in the university's summer festival. And in January 2018, for example, on the initiative of students and with our support, the Romanian Culture Days took place in Jena, illuminating several aspects of the country’s culture, politics and history.
What are the most recent projects?
In the summer of 2018, my colleague Dr Anne Dippel from Cultural Anthropology and I were in contact with colleagues from the University of Iași during a research excursion with students through the regions of Banat, Transylvania and Bukovina. They hosted us in Iași and had previously arranged important contacts with further scientists conducting research on the region of Bukovina at the University of Chernivtsi in Western Ukraine. Finally, in summer 2019 we contributed to an exhibition in Iași, which was organized by the director of the local university museum on university contacts in the socialist era—this early contact of the universities under socialist auspices was particularly interesting. Fortunately, Claudia Hillinger from our International Office and I were even able to see the exhibition on site. During this stay—at the same time, a network meeting of the COIMBRA Group, in which our university is also a member, took place—the possibility arose for me to hold a lecture as well as to arrange a course together with a colleague from Iași; thus a wonderful synergy.
By the way, an alumna of the Southeast European Studies programme of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena is currently working as a DAAD language assistant in Iași, who I highly recommended to the DAAD. So in short, in one way or another we are constantly in exchange.
I therefore look forward with great interest to further detailed discussions with the partners within the framework of EC2U, as well as to the opportunities that will arise beyond the existing contacts.