Research Centre "Prussia - Berlin"
ALEXANDER-VON-HUMBOLDT-FORSCHUNG (Alexander von Humboldt Research Project)
Statue by Reinhold Begas in front of the Humboldt-Universität on Unter den Linden, Berlin, from 1883
Editing Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769–1859) manuscript legacy, his writings from periodicals and other collections, and documents relating to his life and work.
Sample of Humboldt’s diaries, from: Alexander von Humboldt - Von Mexiko-Stadt nach Veracruz. Tagebuch. Ed. by U. Leitner. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 2005, p. 78 (Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung. 25).
The research project´s main responsibility is the edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s correspondence, now that it has completed editing the parts of Humboldt’s diaries written during his famous journey to America (1799–1804). Findings and results from the research are published as monographs, articles and online databases.
In these tasks, the office works closely with other research facilities in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. The internet journal Humboldt im Netz (‘Humboldt online’) is published biannually, jointly with the University of Potsdam.
The current editorial work is focused on Alexander von Humboldt’s correspondence with King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, the French chemistry scholar and explorer Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and the classical philologist August Boeckh. Humboldt’s correspondence with the Mendelssohn family is being published in cooperation with the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum (Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, MMZ) in Potsdam. The correspondence with the astronomer Johann Franz Encke is being edited in the Department for the Didactics of Physics of the University of Siegen, under the supervision of the research project at the Academy.
This Academy Project is part of the Research Centre "Prussia - Berlin" at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
