About Mechtild Rössler

Mechtild Rössler (*1959) is a German geographer (Freiburg University 1984, Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg, 1988).  She joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) at the Research Centre of the Museum “Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie” (Paris, France) in 1989 and worked in 1990/91 as a visiting scholar at the Department of Geography of the University of California at Berkeley, USA. In 1991 she started working at UNESCO (Paris) in the Division for Ecological Sciences and transferred in 1992 to the newly created UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Her focus was the development of cultural landscapes, including conservation and management. She held different positions including as Director of the Heritage Division and Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (2015-2021). She has published and co-authored 13 books and more than 120 articles, among them “Many Voices, One Vision: The Early Years of the World Heritage Convention” (Routledge 2016, with Prof. Christina Cameron). 

After her retirement on 1 October 2021 from UNESCO, she returned to academia and joined the French CNRS as chercheur associé (CNRS-UMR Géographie-Cités) to focus on the evolution of heritage conservation globally, linking nature and culture. She lives both in France and Germany.

Mechtild comes from a family of artists and was always interested in cultural diversity and creativity. Her grandmother Leonie Sapp (*Dahlhoff) was a painter, who had lived in Florence/Italy and had taken classes at the Düsseldorf academy. Her sister Monika Rössler-Ghoualmia is a librarian and anthropologist, who has an atelier for accompanied painting for kids (‘begleitetes Malen’). Her grandfather, a vigneron from Palatine at the border to Alsace, Fritz Rössler, was a hobby artist and her parents Helmut and Ida Rössler, both teachers, were drawing and painting in their free time. They took the children on trips to learn about the heritage of Italy, France and Greece, and to the major museums around Europe.

In 2005 Mechtild came to Goult and was immediately attached to the terraced landscapes surrounding the village, the Conservatoire des cultures en terrasses. Mechtild opened her house to artists and organized exhibitions every year in August.