About
After studying German and Hispanic Literature as well as Media Studies at the University of Bonn and Potsdam, I wrote my doctoral thesis on the American travel works by the Prussian traveller, naturalist and polymath Alexander von Humboldt. His life and works have kept me busy since then. Since 2015, I work as Research Coordinator of the long-time project “Travelling Humboldt. Research on the Move” (
http://www.bbaw.de/en/research/avh-r/synopsis). At “Travelling Humboldt”, my team and I have been working on the “edition humboldt digital” (
https://edition-humboldt.de), editing the manuscripts and correspondence related to Humboldts American as well as Russian-Siberian travels. This work has taken us down the road of digital scholarly editing and the basic truth of protecting cultural heritage through processes of digitization.
Education
Tobias Kraft studied Romance Languages, German Literature and Media Studies in Potsdam and Bonn, Germany. In 2013 he completed his dissertation at the University of Potsdam on the aesthetics and epistemology of science, focusing on the expedition to the American Tropics by the Prussian author and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. The dissertation was published in 2014 by De Gruyter as
Figuren des Wissens bei Alexander von Humboldt. Essai, Tableau und Atlas im Amerikanischen Reisewerk).
Publications
In addition to research on Alexander von Humboldt, Tobias works on travel literature and globalisation as well as on the task of philology and critical scholarly editions in the digital age.
He has co-edited several publications on this subject, including
He has published more than 50
articles, book reviews, and translations in peer-review journals and conference proceedings in German, English, Spanisch, Portuguese, and Chinese.
Projects
Between 2008-2014 he worked as a research associate at the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Potsdam, and afterwards as coordinator of the BMBF joint project “Alexander von Humboldt’s American Travel Diaries: Genealogy, Chronology and Epistemology”.
Since 2015 he is Research Coordinator of the long-term research project
“Traveling Humboldt – Science on the Move” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Since June 2019, he is Director of
“Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD)”, a joint venture between Germany and Cuba aimed at fostering international practices in the Digital Humanities, especially in the digitization, digital preservation, and digital scholarly edition of 19th century manuscripts.
