47 | Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America
Illustration: Yves Haltner
Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America. Three central institutes (founded in 1951, 1963, and 1970) serve to focus area studies through extensive exchange with individuals and institutions in those regions.
Sources and additional information
The university placed a strong emphasis on regional studies from the very beginning. In 1948, the year Freie Universität Berlin was founded, it established an Institute of Anthropology and a chair in Islamic studies. Professorships in Arabic studies and Turkic studies followed. The university set up research institutes to study China in 1953, Japan in Japan in 1956, and Korea in 2004. The Institute for East European Studies was established in 1951. This was followed by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in 1963 and the Institute for Latin American Studies in 1970. A Research Center on Brazil was set up in the Institute for Latin American Studies in 2010.