Simona von Eyb is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Chair of Cultural Management at BTU. She has 20 years of experience in international projects on culture and education in China and Germany. Her background is in the fields of Sinology, English Literature and World Heritage Studies. For her doctoral research, she focused on the application of a collaborative economic model in heritage tourism and the elaboration of new socio-economic practices benefiting vulnerable communities in rural areas. She also holds qualifications in Higher Education Teaching from Harvard University.

Simona worked at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in China, where she lectured on European cultural history and developed several educational programmes with focus on intercultural competence. At BTU, her work in the past years included projects related to tourism and sustainable development, in collaboration with the EU, UNESCO, the World Bank, municipalities and universities. In 2014, she co-organised together with the World Heritage Centre in Paris an expert workshop that led to the formulation of the policy proposal to integrate a sustainable development perspective into the processes of the World Heritage Convention (adopted by the General Assembly of the States Parties to the World Heritage Convention in 2015). Some of her projects with focus on heritage tourism include an Erasmus Mundus project regarding cultural tourism in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, projects on tourism development at heritage sites in cooperation with the World Bank office in Tiblisi, Georgia, the municipality of Assisi in Italy, or Tongji University in Shanghai. She collaborated with the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Union as expert on quality assessment of project proposals in the Culture programme. At BTU, she also contributed to the development of two dual/joint award study programmes on cultural heritage with Deakin University in Melbourne and Helwan University in Cairo.

Simona’s research interests focus on tourism and sustainable development, heritage and economic narratives, collaborative economic systems.

Current courses:
11459 Principles of Tourism and Visitor Management
37405 Tourism
38424 Marketing, PR and Media
113573 Marketing, PR and Media (Online)
13574 Tourism (Online)
37410/37411 Study Project

Past courses:
41408 Cultural Landscapes
37410/37411 Study Project: Fashion and Heritage
37410/37411 Study Project: Tourism Redux - Megatrends and Adaptive Responses of Heritage Destinations
37410/37411 Study Project: Stories We Sell - Tourism Marketing for World Heritage Sites