Gabriele Klein

Gabriele Klein is special professor for ballet and dance (Hans van Manen Chair) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) since 2022. Klein is the first university professor in the Netherlands in the field of dance studies. In addition to current issues such as the archiving and digitalisation of dance, her professorship focuses on historical, current and future developments in ballet and dance in the Netherlands and their relevance in an international context.

Klein studied sociology, history, pedagogy, human movement science and dance and received her doctorate and Habilitation in sociology. Her dissertation was titled FrauenKörperTanz. Eine Zivilisationsgeschichte des Tanzes. She has been at the University of Hamburg since 1994, first as associate professor and since 2002 as full professor of Sociology and Psychology of Human Movement, Dance and Performance Studies. Klein directed the International Centre for Performance Studies and initiated the postgraduate program Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg. 

Klein previously worked as a research associate at the Mozarteum Salzburg (Austria) and at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany). She has also been a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles/UCLA (USA), the University of Bern (Switzerland) and Smith College (USA), and a visiting scholar at Osaka City University (Japan), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Global South Advanced Studies/GLOSAS (Argentina), New York University/NYU (USA) and the Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan), among others.