New head of the International Office
As of 1 January 2022, Dr Marejke Baethge-Assenkamp is the new head of the International Office (IO) at the University of Bremen. She succeeds Dr. Annette Lang, who moved to the Bremen Senate Chancellery last year as Head of International Relations. In her academic career, Dr Baethge-Assenkamp has engaged intensively with international relations between universities and with international alumni.
Most recently, Dr Baethge-Assenkamp – political scientist, ethnologist and linguist – was for several years the personal assistant to the Vice-Rector for International Affairs at the University of Cologne. But her first professional experience in a university international office came long before, in 2006 as a student assistant at the University of Münster (WWU Münster). That was apparently inspiration enough to complete her studies a year later with a DAAD-funded research stay in Kenya and a master's thesis titled "Alumni Associations as Engines of Change in Developing Countries? A case study in Kenya".
“My biggest takeaway from my various research stays in East Africa is that universities have a great social responsibility to engage in international cooperation, in particular to jointly implement UN Sustainable Development Goals with partner institutions. I also see this as part of my job in Bremen," says the new head of the International Office.
At WWU, Dr Baethge-Assenkamp also earned her doctorate in political science, with a dissertation on international higher education policy titled "The higher education sector in the process of regional integration of the East African Community: A case study in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda." She had already discovered her interest in Africa as a child, and then learned East African Kiswahili during her studies.
"I think it's wonderful that the Uni Bremen alumni association also has chapters in Cameroon, Nigeria and Tanzania,” says Dr Baethge-Assenkamp, “and I'm looking forward to future cooperation with Uni Bremen's alumni contacts around the world.”