Ludger Hagedorn studied Philosophy and Slavic Languages in Berlin at the Technical University (TU) and the Free University (FU). He obtained his doctoral degree from TU Berlin in 2002. For many years he has been actively involved in Patočka-Research at the IWM, where he was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 1997 and later became a Research Associate and Research Director. From 2005 to 2009, Hagedorn was holder of the Purkyne-Fellowship awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences. As a lecturer, he has worked at Gutenberg-University Mainz and, for a number of years, at Charles University in Prague. He has also been a Guest Lecturer at Södertörns Högskola (Stockholm) in 2010 and in recent years at NYU Berlin.