Many humanities and cultural science disciplines at the University of Innsbruck have been focusing on “Cultural Encounters and Transfers” for quite some time and with great intensity. However, “Cultural Encounters and Transfers” rank among those vast and highly topical subject areas that have a specific and considerable impact on society and politics but which cannot be researched successfully by individual researchers or a single academic discipline.

In 2009, this dilemma prompted the University Research Centres “Kulturen im Kontakt” (“Cultures in Contact”), “Prozesse der Literaturvermittlung” (“Processes of Literary Dissemination”) and “Schnittstelle Kultur” (“Cultural Interface”), all of which have been working within this field of interest for many years, to join forces and create the research platform “Cultural Encounters and Transfers (CEnT)”. It has already attracted a large number of additional researchers from a diversity of academic disciplines within the faculties of philosophy-history and philological-cultural sciences. As a result, no fewer than 80 researchers are currently working together under the umbrella of CEnT (see “Structure”).

By consolidating the methods and theories applied, the researchers are now venturing down a highly successful path that enables them to embrace the complexity and diversity of cultural encounters and transfers.

As one of seven Research Platforms at the University of Innsbruck, CEnT has set its sights on becoming one of just five academic research focuses, designed to strengthen the university’s profile as a distinguished centre of research and teaching. Establishing CEnT as a university specialism would also acknowledge the existing and often underestimated potential of the human and the cultural sciences to provide necessary answers to issues relating to society and politics.