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President
German Archaeological Institute (DAI)
| Appointee | Friederike Fless |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | German Archaeological Institute (DAI) |
| Domain | Sciences |
| Start | 1 April 2011 |
| End | Currently in role |
| Notes | First woman President of the DAI |
Institutional context
The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (German Archaeological Institute, DAI) is one of the principal European archaeological research bodies, founded in 1829 and operating under the German Federal Foreign Office. The DAI maintains research departments and field operations across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond, and is among the largest single funders of European-led archaeological fieldwork. The President is the senior officer of the institute. From 1829 through April 2011 every President was male — a span of 182 years.
Career path
Friederike Fless (born 1964) is a classical archaeologist who earned a PhD from the Free University of Berlin and has held faculty positions at Berlin, Leipzig, and other German universities. Her research is principally on Roman provincial archaeology and the Black Sea region.
Appointment
She was elected President of the German Archaeological Institute and took office on 1 April 2011. She is the first woman to lead the DAI in the institute's recorded history.
Tenure
Active. Tenure has covered substantial expansion of the DAI's collaboration with German universities, continued operations across more than thirty foreign branch offices, and the institute's response to the Syrian civil-war disruption of long-running fieldwork programmes in Syria and Iraq.
Cluster context
Fless's 2011 appointment is one of the dataset's two European archaeological-institute first-woman events of the same year. Catherine Virlouvet became the first woman Director of the École française d'Athènes in September 2011 — five months later. The two appointments together suggest a 2011 European archaeological-institutional pattern at the senior research-body level.