Short Portrait: Viola König

Viola König
Viola König

Dr. Viola König had an early interest in archaeology and the ancient cultures of America, e.g. Mesoamerica. She took up her studies in Freiburg, where she attended courses in Anthropology, Prehistory, Sociology and Paleoanthropology. Two years later she moved to Hamburg and eventually deepened her knowledge in Pre-Columbian Studies. She found a growing interest in researches on the Oaxaca-region (Graduation thesis „Inhaltliche Analyse und Interpretatation von Codex Egerton 1979).
König had positions at the Ethnographic Museum in Hamburg, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, and was the head of the Ethnographical Section of the Landesmuseum in Hannover. She not only took care of the Ethnographic Collection and the conception of exhibitions but ongoingly did further research projects in Alaska. In 1992 she became the director of the Übersee-Museum in Bremen.

In 1997 König started to give academic lectures, mainly at the universities in Hamburg and Bremen, but also as a visiting professor in New Orleans. Since 2001 she is the director of the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin and moreover holds a honorary chair at the Institute for Latin American Studies (Lateinamerika-Institut, LAI) in Berlin. 

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