Hey there, my name is Tilmann Kulke. After defending my Ph.D. thesis in May 2016, I took a position at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, as an assistant professor for Islamic and global history.
Before arriving in Tbilisi, I trained at the universities of Cologne and Bonn, the German Historical Institute Paris, Doğuš Üniversitesi Istanbul, Damascus University and the European University Insitute in Florence. I also attended the German School in Delhi. My personal love for India started there.
I am primarily interested in the history of multiple globalizations and narratological analyses of premodern Islamic texts. Here, I focus on the Mughal Empire and early modern Georgia, in order to retrace the cultural connections between both of these fascinating cultures (roughly between 1300-1800) and to position Georgia and the Caucasian regions in a more global and comparative perspective.
I have taught Arabic at the University of Cologne from the early stages of my studies. As I know from my own experience how hard it often is to continue studying the complexities of unfamiliar languages, I have always been passionately committed to explaining difficult new tasks in an easy and comprehensible way. I also consider it a teacher’s duty to motivate his/her students to follow their studies with passion and joy, which includes focused preparation for exams, successful applications for scholarships and teaching them how to avoid stress and to get the most possible out of their work. The last two skills mainly derive from my second great passion besides new academic endeavors: basketball.
As an editor, I have been collaborating with several online peer-reviewed journals within German-speaking academia, such as ‘sehepunkte’, ‘zeitenblicke’, ‘geschichte.transnational’, ‘h-soz-kult’, and, most recently, ‘connections’. I am the initiator and editor-in-chief of the researchers’ journal at the historical department of the EUI in collaboration with ‘geschichte.transnational’ and ‘connections’. Together with Stephan Conermann (Bonn), I initiated the online review journal ‘Islamische Welten’ in collaboration with ‘sehepunkte’. Here, I also work as a specialist editor for Islamic history and early modern global history.