Current News

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Brendan and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson who accepted an Assistant Professorship in the Faculty of Philosophy at the College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Miami, USA. They start working there on September 1, 2015. We wish them all the best.

More information: http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/people/

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Beatriz Puente Ballesteros who accepted a (Tenure Track) Assistant Professorship at the Chair for East-West Interactions in the Department of History at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Macao, S.A.R., China. She will start working there on September 1, 2015. We wish her all the best.

Philip Leifeld received the Award for the Best Conference Paper on Political Networks, sponsored by the American Political Science Association (APSA). The award-winning paper with the title “A Theoretical and Empirical Comparison of the Temporal Exponential Random Graph Model and the Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model” (joint work with Skyler J. Cranmer, The Ohio State University) was presented at the Political Networks Conference 2014 in Montreal.

More information: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06696

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation jointly offer Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at Universities and Research Institutes in Germany and the U.S. The Fellowships aim at enabling postdoctoral researchers based in the U.S. to spend some time conducting studies at universities or research institutes in Germany. The grants will be awarded for a period of 9 - 12 months for the academic year 2016/2017. Application deadline is October 8, 2015. The Zukunftskolleg is…

Nina Schneider was invited by the National University of Brasília (UNB) to talk about the concept of transitional justice and her new volume “Legacies of State violence and Transitional Justice in Cold War Latin America: a Janus-faced Paradigm?”, co-edited with Marcia Esparza (JJAY College). The UNB is currently hosting a new transitional justice network - the „Rede Latino-Americana de Justiça de Transição” (RLAJT, The Latin American Transitional Justice Network). One of the members of the RLAJT…

We congratulate Zhongbao Jian who accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Münster. From October 1, 2015 he will work at the Organic Chemistry Institute on his research project “Frustrated Lewis Pairs”.

Congratulations to Thomas Böttcher: He is one of ten new members in the Junge Akademie. One artist and nine junior scientists from various disciplines, ranging from biophysics to the history of science, were welcomed at the annual celebration of the Junge Akademie on June 6, 2015. The Junge Akademie was founded in 2000 as a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. It provides interdisciplinary and socially…

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Edina Szöcsik who accepted a postdoc position at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She works within a comparative research project about the strategies of radical right parties, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for three years.

We congratulate Daniele Brida who was awarded the Fresnel Prize. It is awarded every two years by the European Physical Society for outstanding contributions to quantum electronics and optics made by young scientists before the age of 35. The jury´s motivation for choosing Daniele Brida was: “The 2015 Fresnel Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Daniele Brida, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, for the development of broadly tunable few-optical-cycle laser sources and their…

The Zukunftskolleg launched a new funding program that aims to support cooperations between former and current Fellows. The program comes out of the credo of the Zukunftskolleg “once a Fellow, always a Fellow”. Read more here.

We congratulate physicists Gianluca Rastelli and Denis Seletskiy who received a RiSC grant. The Research Seed Capital (RiSC) program is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK) Baden-Württemberg.
Gianluca Rastelli´s project entitled “Many-body interaction and decoherence in superconducting Josephson lattice qubits” is funded for 2 years to the amount of 94.990 Euros – and co-funded by the Young Scholar Fund of the University of Konstanz. Denis Seletskiy receives 99.410…

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Margarita Stolarova who has accepted a Temporary Professorship for Developmental Psychology at the University of Konstanz in summer term 2015.

Congratulations to Ulrich Sieberer: the Editorial Board of the Journal of Legislative Studies awarded him the “Best JLS Paper of the Past 20 Years” for his essay “Party Unity in Parliamentary Democracies. A Comparative Analysis”: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13572330600739413#.VQlwjeHzFxJ

We congratulate Julián Torres Dowdall who received a DFG grant to the amount of 324.400 euros to continue his project “Does side matter? The evolution of asymmetric genitalia in livebearing fish”. “In the next three years the research money will be used to do next generation sequencing to answer three questions”, explains the biologist. “1. What are the phylogenetic relationships between Anablepidae fish? 2. Does genital asymmetry result in genetic divergence between asymmetrical morphs? 3. Can…

Working at the Zukunftskolleg can lead to more innovative topics – at least according to a study entitled “Age and the trying out of new ideas”. Economist Mikko Packalen from the University of Waterloo in Canada and economist Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University in California conducted an analysis of more than 20 million biomedical papers published over the past 70 years. They found that young researchers are much more likely than older scientists to study exciting innovative topics.…

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Ilja Serzants who accepted a postdoctoral position at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz. In February 2015 he started working as Principal Investigator in the TriMCo project: Triangulation Approach for Modelling Convergence with a High Zoom-In factor. It aims to uncover the multi-factorial mechanisms leading to the rise of linguistic areas.

More information: https://www.trimco.uni-mainz.de/

We congratulate Denis Seletskiy who has been accepted into the Baden-Württemberg Foundation‘s elite program for postdoctoral students. For his project „Ultrafast Spectroscopy of Laser Cooling Cycle in Bulk and Nanoscale Solids“ he will receive 113.000 Euro for a duration of 3 years, co-funded by the Zukunftskolleg. Thanks to the funding he will be able to cover personnel and equipment costs.

More information about the Elite Program: http://www.bwstiftung.de/bildung/programme/hochschule/elitepro…

On time to its first birthday the Center for Multilingualism received a nice present: Its application for a transfer platform „Multilingualism in kindergartens and schools“ to the amount of 162.680 Euro was granted. The project was initiated by Tanja Rinker and Janet Grijzenhout and will be funded by the Excellence Initiative for two years. The goal is to increase and promote multilingualism in educational institutions. “We will collaborate with practitioners from kindergartens and schools. In…

Interdisciplinary, international, intergenerational and inter-institutional: a cooperation that started in 2011 involving researchers from the Zukunftskolleg and the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz resulted now in the volume “Berechnen/Beschreiben. Praktiken statistischen (Nicht-)Wissens 1750‐1850.” The editors are the Zukunftskolleg Fellows Gunhild Berg and Zsuzsanna Török, as well as Marcus Twellmann from the Center of Excellence.…

We congratulate Daniele Brida who was successful in applying to the Emmy Noether program. He will receive 1.65 million Euros for his project “Femtosecond dynamics in layered materials”. It is about the study of fundamental processes excited by ultrashort light pulses in materials like graphene. The idea is to observe interactions between photoexcited electrons in systems characterized by the fact that are confined in two dimensions. The project duration is 5 years.

More information on the Emmy…

We congratulate Sarang Dalal who has received an ERC Starting Grant in the amount 1,5 Million Euros. His 5-year project is called “The retinae as windows to the brain: An oscillatory vision”. “In this project, we will examine in detail how neural oscillations in the human retina code visual information and facilitate communication with cerebral cortex for further processing”, explains Sarang Dalal. “The retina is not simply a sensor, but performs rather sophisticated processing of visual input…

The radio station Deutsche Welle Brasil published an interview with Nina Schneider, in which she provides a first assessment of the final report of the Brasilian Truth Commission that was released on December 10, 2014. She expects that the research activities about the military regime (1964-1985) will continue.

Many families of the disappeared continue lacking information about the whereabouts and circumstances of death of their loved ones disappeared during the dictatorship. The Truth…

Ulrich Sieberer and Dominik Hierlemann, on behalf of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, have conducted a study on the performance of the German Parliament: the way it debates, the media coverage of these debates, and their perception by citizens. The study finds that parliamentary debates seem to be quite boring for the public, thus media report poorly about them, and as a consequence people know very little about the work and the decisions taken by their representatives. On the other hand citizens’…

Andreas Thum – in cooperation with Dorit Merhof from the University of Aachen and Katja Bühler from the Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualization (VRVis) in Vienna – has received a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in the amount of about 1.1 Million Euro. Their joined approach aims at establishing a 4D reconstruction of the entire larval brain (about 10.000 neurons). The project will be realized by their synergistic expertise in the field of…

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Eleanor Coghill who accepted a position at the University of Zurich. In February 2015 she will start working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the inter-departmental project “Sprache und Raum” (Language and Space). Nevertheless she will still be in Konstanz and continue her project at the University of Konstanz.

The Zukunftskolleg offers new calls for applications for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Projects and Transdepartmental Collaborative Teaching. The call for interdisciplinary research projects aims to promote research collaboration within the Zukunftskolleg or between a Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg and other researchers. It gives grant holders the opportunity to identify and explore new, innovative and/or risky research perspectives with neighbouring disciplines and across disciplines.
The…

A cooperation born at the Zukunftskolleg between Doris Penka and Chiara Gianollo now resulted in the publication “Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (ed. Gianollo, Chiara; Jäger, Agnes; Penka, Doris):

http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/314115

They thanked the Zukunftskolleg for its support: “It's safe to say that this book definitely wouldn't exist without the Zukunftskolleg. First of all, it originated out of the collaboration that we started at the Zukunftskolleg. The…

We congratulate Barbara Hausmair who has won the Erwin Wenzl Prize of the state of Upper Austria for her dissertation “Am Rande des Grabs. Todeskonzepte und Bestattungsritual in der frühmittelalterlichen Alamannia“. The prize is honored with 2.500 Euros. The award ceremony will take place in Linz in December.

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Joanna Chojnicka who has accepted a teaching appointment at the Leuphana University Lüneburg in winter term 2014/15. She teaches a B.A. seminar on “Nachhaltigkeit in Diskursanalyse: Theorien und Methoden”.