Prof. Dr Anne Fleig, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Free University of Berlin, has been elected the new President of the Heinrich von Kleist Society. She succeeds the long-time president Prof. Dr. Günter Blamberger from the University of Cologne, who held the office for 25 years. She announced that she wanted to work even harder for the "promotion of young academics, the history of the reception of the author Heinrich von Kleist and a greater visibility of the Kleist Prize".

Anne Fleig, born in 1968, studied Modern German Literature and Media Studies, Art History and Sociology at Philipps-Universität Marburg. She habilitated at Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2006 and accepted an appointment at Freie Universität Berlin in 2010. She is a member of the board of the Collaborative Research Centre Affective Societies and deputy spokesperson of the Research Training Group Normativity, Critique, Change. Her areas of specialisation include literature around 1800, cultural modernity and contemporary literature; gender studies in literary studies, the history of emotions and the body, and multilingualism and belonging.