Andrea Rapp elected as new president of the Academy of the Sciences and Literature

Andrea Rapp, born in Birkesdorf (Düren) in 1963, studied German language and literature, art history and ethnology at the University of Trier, where she gained her doctorate in 1996. After a period at the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen, where she headed the digitisation centre, she became Managing Director of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and a Researcher in German Medieval Studies. Andrea Rapp has been Professor of German Studies – Computer Philology and Medieval Studies at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies in the Department of History and Social Sciences at TU Darmstadt since 2010.

In addition to her professorship, Andrea Rapp holds a number of other positions. From 2017 to 2019, she was Vice President for Academic Infrastructure at TU Darmstadt. Since 2021, she has been Vice Spokesperson of the NFDI consortium Text+. In 2019, Andrea Rapp was elected as a full member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature and was elected Vice President of the Academy in 2023.

Her teaching and research focuses on the fields of medieval manuscript studies, historical varieties of written language, digital lexicography and edition philology as well as digital annotation methods and infrastructures. In her research on the language, literature and culture of the Middle Ages, Rapp promotes the integrative combination of traditional philological and digital methods. This includes the development of digital analysis technologies, the creation of digital editions and dictionaries, the sustainable development of research infrastructures and the reflection of digitality in philological research and in the field of cultural heritage.

Andrea Rapp succeeds Reiner Anderl, who had been President of the Academy since 2017. Anderl's achievements include successfully leading the Academy through the corona pandemic, establishing the Academy as a supporting organisation of the NFDI4Culture consortium in the field of digitality and implementing the construction project to build the Kalkhof-Rose-Saal.

Translation of a source from:
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz
Pressemitteilung – 1. Juli 2025 (Pressestelle)