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

On 27 June 2025, Prof. Dr. Andrea Rapp was elected as the new president by the members of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz. She will succeed Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Anderl, who held the office of president for eight years, on 1 July.

Andrea Rapp, born in Birkesdorf (Düren) in 1963, studied German language and literature, art history and ethnology at the University of Trier, where she received her doctorate in 1996. After a stint at the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen, where she was head of the digitisation centre, she became managing director of the Trier Centre for Digital Humanities and academic advisor in medieval German studies. Since 2010, Andrea Rapp has been professor of German studies – computer philology, and medieval studies at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

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

Her teaching and research focus on medieval manuscript studies, historical written language varieties, digital lexicography and editorial philology, as well as digital annotation methods and infrastructures. In her research on medieval language, literature and culture, 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 replaces Reiner Anderl, who had been president of the academy since 2017. Anderl's achievements include successfully guiding the academy through the coronavirus pandemic, establishing the academy as the supporting institution of the NFDI4Culture consortium in the field of digitalisation, and implementing the construction project to build the Kalkhof-Rose-Saal.

Press release (german)