Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study

The “Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study” (HIAS) was founded in January 2019 as a cooperative association of selected Hamburg universities and the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Hamburg. It invites outstanding scientists and researchers as well as visual and performing artists to Hamburg and enables them to conduct interdisciplinary research and exchange. The fellows receive organizational and financial support for their research projects of their own choice along urgent questions of social challenges of the present and the future. The ZEIT-Stiftung supports research stays in the field of humanities and social sciences.

The first Gerd Bucerius Fellowship was awarded to the writer and literary scholar Professor Anna Katharina Schaffner from the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent. At HIAS she worked from October 2020 till March 2021 on the completion of her monograph "Self-Improvement: A Global History" on self-optimization as a basic human need. Professor Sighard Neckel, Chair Society and Social Change at the University of Hamburg, was her tandem partner in order to ensure an intensive exchange with the academic community on site.

In the academic year 2021/2022 Andrea Frisch, professor of French and Core Faculty in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, receives the Bucerius Fellowship. Her project at HIAS examines the relationship between news and historiography about the French Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. She collaborates with Professor Markus Friedrich, Chair for Early Modern History at the University of Hamburg