Leibniz Graduate School for Cultures of Knowledge in Central European Transnational Contexts

Since 2010 and supported by the Pact on Research and Innovation of the Leibniz Association, the Herder Institute in Marburg, in cooperation with the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the Gießen Eastern Europe Centre (GiZo) at the Justus Liebig University, Gießen, has been awarding three-year scholarships for graduate students studying for doctorates and post-docs. The speaker of the Leibniz Graduate School, set up in 2010, is the Director of the Herder Institute, Prof. Peter Haslinger, and the deputy speaker is Prof. Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Justus Liebig University, Gießen.

The Herder Institute, a member of the Leibniz Association, is a research and infrastructure facility that is intensively involved with the history and culture of East Central Europe (with a focus on Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the region of Kaliningrad). The Institute offers one of the best specialist libraries and has extensive collections (images, maps and archival materials with a focus on the Baltic States). It conducts research and development projects and organises conferences, workshops and lectures. Its numerous publications include the Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung (Periodical of East Central European Research). The Institute also focuses on the IT area.

The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) is supported through the national and regional Excellence Initiative and offers structured cultural and academic training towards doctorates. With an excellent research-intensive environment, a doctorate program tailored to the target group and intensive personal supervision, the Graduate Centre offers its graduate students studying for doctorates and postdocs ideal working conditions and tailor-made preparation for the time after their doctorate, both for academic and non-university-based careers.

The Gießen Eastern European Centre (GiZo) is the regional academic research and teaching centre on East Europe at the Justus Liebig University, Gießen. It was founded in July 2006, and brings together research and teaching on the humanities on East Europe in Hesse. Thus it is the first facility in Hesse to sign up to such an interdisciplinary arrangement and to such a breadth of research and teaching on East Europe.

The program is dedicated to the fundamental problem of knowledge transfer, which in spite of successes in the field of education during the eastward enlargement has in no way lost its explosive nature: an increasing internationalisation of research and the shift in concepts and organisational forms. In a central European East-West context, the communication of core cultural and academic subjects is determined by innovative adoptions as well as the persistence of national patterns of interpretation and transmission. The Leibniz Graduate School compares this to a concept of multilateral, dialogic knowledge transfer. It has taken on the task of establishing graduate training that is transnational in an East-West context and based on modern concepts.

The subject therefore focuses on the status of knowledge cultures in a central European context. What is fundamental in this is the basic cultural academic orientation resulting from the tasks, resources and the close regional, national and international network of cooperation of the Herder Institute. The Leibniz Graduate School therefore supports projects that are ideally suited to making a substantial contribution to the discussion of the following subjects:

  • European knowledge cultures and academic communication from the Early Modern Period to the present day: Forums, networks, people, generations, forms of socialisation, political framework conditions
  • National and transnational knowledge orders and intellectual styles
  • Pluralisation, (self-) instrumentalisation, Gleichschaltung, transformation of academic enterprises
  • Concepts and key terms in academic communication: Nation, class, ethnicity, gender, religion
  • Academic cultures in the age of globalisation and digital networking

 

Target groups of the graduate program are primarily young academics from East Central Europe, who want to bring experience from their own countries to a Central European context of comparison and reflection in a dialogic way. However, academics from other countries that want to make a contribution to the subject and get to know the German academic structure from the inside are also supported.

In the context of research, the scholarship holders are tied to the Justus Liebig University, Gießen, are enrolled there and must be allocated to at least one of the research areas of the GCSC and one of the sections of the GiZo. From the teaching available at the university, they select at least one course per term and carry out the appropriate work. In the colloquium for doctoral candidates, both the interim results of individual projects are discussed and the functionality and organisational principles of national, international, transnational and transdisciplinary academic cultures are examined. Postdocs have the opportunity to offer courses at the Philipps University, Marburg or the Justus Liebig University, Giessen.

Perspectives on academic cultures in transnational and transdisciplinary contexts, as well as academic styles and (historical and current) political academic developments are addressed in our own series of workshops and lectures. The results and impetus from these activities are brought together in two summer schools, in which the scholarship holders, the collaborating institutions and East Central European partner universities are included in the program of events. Participants are members of the GCSC, which allows participation in all of the workshops, master classes and similar, and use of the services (career centre). At the Herder Institute, the scholarship holders can enrol in modules to obtain additional qualifications in the fields of library- and Internet resource-management, as well as in the management of third-party funds and und the planning of academic programs.

Six graduate students studying for doctorates and two postdocs are currently supported within the framework of the Leibniz Graduate School.

 

Dissertation projects

Hierasimowicz, Konrad: Two Belaruses or Belarus 2.0? National identity and historical discourses in Social Media

Kolková, Stanislava: Textualization and contextualization of "nation" and "state". The cultural and scientific elites as importers and exporters of knowledge in Slovakia from 1938 to 1948.

Kuligowska, Kinga: The emigration of Polish intellectuals after March 1968 – a journey into freedom of thought?

Nenartovič, Tomaš: Territorial Concepts and Geopolitics in Northeastern Europe 1890-1939

Piotrowska, Dominika: Modern residential architecture in the Neumark

 

Post-docs

Dr. Christian Lotz: Time and space as incalculable variables? Plans for the utilisation of European timber resources under the impression of industrialized acceleration (1870-1914)