About us

Founded in 1950, the Herder Institute is an internationally renowned center for research on Eastern Central Europe. In the
context of the Leibniz Association’s expertise in Eastern Europe, which has been significantly expanded since 2017, the institute, as an institution of scientific infrastructure with its infrastructural facilities and globally unique collections, has an important profile and unique selling point.

The research library also includes an extensive collection of daily and weekly newspapers of East Central European origin. The scientific collections consist of a picture archive, a map collection and a document collection with a focus on the Baltic
States.

The Herder Institute supports a wide range of scientific activities on the historical and cultural development of East Central Europe through its research, knowledge transfer, documentation and digitalization departments. The focus of interest
is on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. An important concern is the joint exploration of the interrelation of this core region with its neighbors (above all Germany, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia) in a comparative pan-European context. For several years now, the Digital Humanities have been a major focus of the institute’s work, both in the area of digital and social infrastructure development as well as in research and career development.

The unique collections consist of a research library on the history and culture of East Central Europe, which now contains more than half a million media units, including a music collection, a samizdat collection and a press collection. Daily and weekly newspapers from East Central Europe have been archived since 1952 and have been evaluated for the period up to 1999 in a systematic collection of more than 5 million clippings. In addition, the Institute also has one of the best image archives with image carriers of all kinds, especially on the art and cultural history of East Central Europe (currently about 700,000 units), a map collection with about 45,000 map sheets, about 1,200 old maps and slightly more than 6,300 aerial photographs from the years between 1942 and 1945. Finally, the document collection focuses on the history of the Baltic
States and continuously collects estates, family archives, individual archival documents as well as photographed archival records (about 1,300 running meters of shelving). The materials held in stock are the starting point for our own research, close cooperation with the two universities in Giessen and Marburg in research and teaching, and close networking with numerous other Leibniz institutions (Leibniz Research Associations).

The institute is oriented in its research and infrastructure tasks to:

Current project-leading perspectives

• Collecting, preserving, indexing and communicating

• Visual history and art history

• Reflection and design of digital change

• Space – City – Environment

• Political orders – conflict – security

As an institution of research for East Central Europe and related scientific services will ever funded equally by the federal government and the 16 states, led by the State of Hesse. 18 institutions and commissions constitute the corporate members in the association of the Herder Institute.

In scientific and conceptual issues, the Institute is advised by an internationally composed Scientific Advisory Board. The decision to structure and finance of the Institute is ultimately the responsibility of the Board of Trustees.  In addition to numerous partners at home and abroad, in particular promotes the contact with the Chair appointed as Leibniz and Herder Chair scientists networking. The structure of the Institute is represented in the chart. In addition to the departments, we find such cross-cutting areas such as equal opportunities, research coordination.

The structure of the Herder Institute can be found in our organization chart. The annual reports from previous years can be found here.

Since 2015 Dr. Jürgen Warmbrunn is representative for equal opportunity in the Herder Institutes board.

Equal Opportunities Officer:
Dr. Anna-Lena Körfer
anna-lena.koerfer@herder-institut.de
Tel.: 06421/184-242

Vice Equal Opportunities Officer:
Anna Caroline Haubold
caroline.haubold@herder-institut.de
Tel.: +49 6421 184-208

By providing Open Access to academic publications, we make research findings more visible to more people and this helps to accelerate the process of innovation. The Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe promotes Open Access and has adopted an Open Access Policy.

At the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, our research staff have the opportunity to offer their publications on an open source basis via our in-house Publication Server and using the open source software OPUS. These tools also give them the option of verifying any of their existing Open Access publications.

» to the Statute of the Herder Institute