FRIAS funds temporary interdisciplinary group research, welcoming scholars from all fields to collaborate on innovative topics. Open to a wide range of themes, FRIAS offers a productive and supportive environment for discussion and debate. This page provides an overview of the current projects.
What is Global History? Led by renowned historian and Balzan Laureate Jürgen Osterhammel, this project explores the foundations of global history over the past three decades. The project pays special attention to how we study and imagine global history, the often overlooked ideas behind it, its political importance for different groups, and how global events have influenced specific regions, particularly since the 18th century. This initiative brings together young scholars, hosts public lectures with leading historians, and organizes exclusive workshops to tackle the big questions in global history.
Period of Funding: 2018-2025
The Connecticut / Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) provides a platform to promote and support academic collaboration between researchers and research groups at universities and other research institutions in the State of Connecticut (USA) and the Land Baden-Württemberg (Germany). The Consortium is designed to serve as an incubator for diverse and interdisciplinary human rights research projects, generate critical knowledge on key human rights-related issues, and disseminate its findings.
Period of Funding: 2019-2026
While many studies on the aftermaths of war focus on Europe and the Western world in the 20th century, this Project Group is shifting the perspective to diverse cultural and historical contexts, from antiquity to the present. Bringing together researchers from law, history, and literature, the group aims to understand post-war periods not merely as transitions from war to peace. Instead, they mark a specific ‘in-between’ phase, characterized by contradictory dynamics.
Period of Funding: 2024-2025
Glass is of one of humankind’s earliest high performance materials the importance of which has only grown with time. The history of this material has been closely linked to the cultural context. A FRIAS Project Group of researchers from fields as diverse as archaeology, literature, and microsystems engineering explore the cultural and historic context of glass and the breakthroughs and asks how the know-how of past cultures can inspire modern material developments.
Period of Funding: 2024-2025