Interview with Prof. Dr. Elsa Clavé"The tenure-track program offers sufficient time to focus on all aspects of the professorship"
1 July 2025, by Zsuzsa Becker

Photo: UHH/Esfandiari
After successfully completing the tenure track evaluation process after six years as a junior professor, Prof. Dr. Elsa Clavé is now W2 Professor of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia (Austronesian Studies) at the Asia-Africa Institute since July 2025. In this interview, she explains how she has benefited from the tenure track program and what she will do next.
Congratulations on successfully completing your tenure-track procedure and receiving a tenured professorship. You joined us in 2019 from the Asia Center at the University of Harvard. What were your goals and expectations when you started in Hamburg?
I came here because of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefact”. My expectation was to find a place where I could gain new inspiration for my research topic – Malay socio-cultural history – as well as for my sources, which are written in Malay in an adapted Arabic script. Researching Malay history in collaboration with Malay philologists and historians from Southeast Asia is nice, but I find it even more enriching to collaborate with scholars researching pre-modern Europe, China and Islamic manuscripts in Africa. For me, there is no substitute for these intellectual stimuli, which constantly generate new ideas.
What advantages does the tenure-track program offer early career researchers and how have you benefited from the program?
The tenure track program gave me the opportunity to develop ideas for my research and teaching and to make a name for myself as a professor in my field. I wouldn't have been able to do this with several consecutive postdoc positions. The tenure-track program offers sufficient time to focus on all aspects of the professorship, including teaching, research and knowledge exchange. At the same time, it offers institutional stability and a status that enables the development of long-term international collaborations and projects. This has enabled me to initiate projects with the Philippines and Malaysia.
Were there any mentors, colleagues or other support that particularly helped you during your junior professorship?
I am very well integrated in my department. My colleagues have always helped me a lot when I had questions. The interim evaluation was also very helpful for me, as it gave me the opportunity to realign my work with the expectations of the German academic system, which is different from the systems I've known so far. Without the tenure-track program, many aspects of my profession would probably have remained unknown to me. The guidance and support I received was the key. Without support, I would have worked a lot without fulfilling expectations.
What plans do you have for the coming years - in research, teaching, knowledge exchange and personally?
Southeast Asian studies is a small subject, but it is indispensable in the cosmopolitan and interconnected world we live in. We are constantly in contact with other cultures and often encounter preconceived schemas - who is right, who is wrong, how things should be done.
I believe that the ability to "unframe" our thinking in order to understand other cultures – including other people – is a great strength. I want to convince those who do not yet have this ability. This is all the more important as we live in a time of growing intolerance and dangerous ideologies. I believe in a university that plays a role in societal debates and hope to work in this direction in the coming years through teaching, research and knowledge exchange – I prefer this term to transfer.
In the near future, I am preparing two monographs: one on the changes in spatial perception associated with the emergence of a plantation economy in 19th century Malaysia, and another on the memory of the 1965-66 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia, which unfortunately (despite the global dimension of the event) are still little known. I am also working with artists in Indonesia on this project. It gives me great pleasure to find new ways to communicate the research process. I plan to continue this approach in the future.
And on a personal note, I plan to write a novel. It's a different form of writing that corresponds to other things I have to say.