Stefan Troebst has been Deputy Director at the GWZO since 1999. He studied History, Slavic Studies, Balkan Studies, Political Science and Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin as well as at the Universities of Tübingen, Sofia (Bulgaria), Skopje (Yugoslavia, today Macedonia) and Indiana University in Bloomington, (U.S.A.) and wrote his doctoral thesis on “Mussolini, Macedonia and the Powers 1922-1930: The ‘Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization’ in the Southeast European Policy of Fascist Italy”. He was a research associate and university assistant for Eastern European Contemporary History at the Institute for Eastern European Studies at the Free University of Berlin and a postdoctoral fellow of the German Research Foundation. He habilitated on the topic “Trade Control – ‘Derivation’ – Containment. Swedish Moscow Policy 1617-1661” (published in Wiesbaden 1997); after holding a professorship in Modern History at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg and a Heisenberg fellowship from the DFG, he was appointed Professor of Cultural Studies of Eastern Central Europe at the Philological Faculty of the University of Leipzig in 1999. Since 2015, he has been Professor of Cultural History for Eastern Europe at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy there, as well as Head of the Master’s programme “European Studies” at the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI) at the University of Leipzig.