Sebastian Ambros

National and International Public Law with a Focus on the Protection of Cultural Heritage

Institute of Cultural Studies

Tel.: +49 89 6004-3008

Photographer: Walter M. Rammler

About me

After completing my secondary education (Abitur) in 2008, I spent over a year in northern France doing a European Voluntary Service with a Catholic charity that supports people experiencing homelessness and other difficult life circumstances.

From 2009 to 2018, I studied Law as well as History and History of Art at the Universität Passau, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Pakistan), Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, the Université de Nantes (France), and Birzeit University (Palestine). These studies were complemented by stays in Lyon, Stuttgart and Frankfurt/Main (law firms), in Berlin (Museum of Islamic Art), and in Geneva (Permanent German Mission to the United Nations and other International Organizations), as well as by various study trips.

I completed my legal clerkship (Referendariat) from 2018 to 2020 in Fulda (Regional Court, Public Prosecutor’s Office, private legal practice), Frankfurt/Main (S. Fischer Publishers, Städelschule), Kassel (Administrative Court), and Berlin (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).

After passing the Second State Examination in Law in 2020, I worked for nearly two years as a legal assistant in the Dispute Resolution department of the Frankfurt/Main office of an international law firm. During this time, I also held several teaching appointments at the Hochschule Fulda. Since October 2022, I have been a researcher and lecturer at the Universität der Bundeswehr München.

Also in 2020, I began work on an interdisciplinary doctoral thesis – initially at the Institute of Art History at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and now at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Genève (Switzerland) – in which I seek to demonstrate that there is no such thing as ownership of cultural property, but that it is nevertheless possible to consider to whom it should belong.

Qualifications

Bachelor of Laws in ‘German and French Law’ (Mainz); thesis on the annulment, recognition and enforcement of foreign and international arbitral awards in Germany and France
Maîtrise de droit in ‘European and International Law’ (Nantes)
First State Examination in Law (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Second State Examination in Law (Hesse)
Bachelor of Arts in ‘History (major), History of Art (minor)’ (Mainz); thesis on the German-Ottoman alliance in the First World War and its impact on Islamic jihad, awarded by the faculty council
Successfully completed supplementary studies (Munich) qualifying for admission to doctoral studies in History of Art

What I am thinking about

Interdisciplinary integration of legal and cultural studies, in particular through the development of a combined theory of society, law, culture, objects and subjects in the form of the “Sphere Theory”
History, theory and law of tangible and intellectual property
History, theory and law of cultural heritage/cultural property, in particular:
- its protection in armed conflict and in peacetime
  - relationship to memory and collective memory
  - interaction with sustainability law
- its return/restitution following dispossession and translocation

Material culture of Europe and the Arab-Islamic world