Group Projects
Group Projects
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.
Balzan-FRIAS Project
in Global History
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
Human Rights
Research Consortium (HRRC)
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
Agrivoltaics
The FRIAS Project Group Agrivoltaics researches the combination of agriculture and renewable energy as a contribution to climate resilience and the energy transition. Working with partners such as Fraunhofer ISE, Freiburg Research Collaboration Programme (FRESCO) and the Young Academy for Sustainability Research (YAS), the group promotes networking, supports young researchers, and prepares grant applications to ensure the long term and sustainable utilization of project results.
Period of Funding: 2025-2026
GreenPulse
Public health and environmental sustainability are significantly affected by the impacts of urban climate change, which urgently demands innovative environmental monitoring solutions. GreenPulse, as an energy-autonomous wireless sensor system, seeks to overcome the limitations of current monitoring stations by providing high-resolution and real-time urban air quality monitoring. It is specially designed for mobile platforms like bikes and uses low-cost sensors to track spatiotemporal environmental dynamics on air pollutants, temperature and humidity.
Period of Funding: 2025-2026
Post War Periods
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 Age
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
