Dr. Dr. h.c. Silvia Tellenbach

Silvia Tel­l­en­bach was born in Freiburg in 1950. She moved to Italy in 1963, where she com­pleted her sec­ond­ary school edu­ca­tion (Abit­ur) in 1969. Fa­cing the al­tern­at­ive of study­ing com­par­at­ive lin­guist­ics or law, she op­ted for law but con­tin­ued to study Itali­an, Span­ish, and Rus­si­an (in­ter­me­di­ate ex­am­in­a­tion in Slavic lan­guages and lit­er­at­ure). After at­tend­ing the uni­versit­ies of Göt­tin­gen, Tübin­gen, and Freiburg, she com­pleted her stud­ies with the first state ex­am­in­a­tion (1. Jur­istisches Staat­sexa­men) in 1974 and, after her leg­al train­ing in the ju­di­cial ser­vice (Ref­er­endari­at), with the second state ex­am­in­a­tion (2. Jur­istisches Staat­sexa­men) in 1976. Dur­ing her ju­di­cial ser­vice, she joined the Max Planck In­sti­tute as a stu­dent as­sist­ant and began to learn Ar­ab­ic. Fol­low­ing the second state ex­am­in­a­tion, she took up Is­lam­ic stud­ies in Freiburg and Cairo, learn­ing Ar­ab­ic, Per­sian, and Turk­ish. She earned her doc­tor­ate with a dis­ser­ta­tion on the con­sti­tu­tion of the Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic of Ir­an. At the same time, she star­ted to build up the re­search sec­tion “Tur­key, Ir­an, and the Ar­ab States” at the Max Planck In­sti­tute for For­eign and In­ter­na­tion­al Crim­in­al Law. She has held the po­s­i­tion of head of sec­tion since 1984. In Sept. 2017 Silvia Tel­l­en­bach was awar­ded an hon­or­ary doc­tor­ate from Bahçeşe­hir Uni­versity in Istan­bul.