Scholarly Components

The programmatic heart of the Center of Excellence was the Institute for Advanced Study. Inspired by renowned institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, it providee established scholars with the freedom which is so urgently needed in order to concentrate on writing essays and completing books.

With the professorships in the Center, the spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in Konstanz has been expanded, without however establishing barren one-professor disciplines. Full professorships in religion and the history of science re-aligned themes and methods in the area of history. The full professorship in cultural anthropology has been admitted into the sociological curriculum, the culture-theoretical one into literary studies. The theoretical objectives of the Center have found their institutional place besides in the Research Initiative “Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary”.

The two courses of study established by the Center, “Studies in European Culture” and “International Administration and Conflict Management”, will continue to introduce students to the Center’s topic.

In the Ph.D. program “Europe in the Globalized World” and within the research groups, doctoral students received intensive supervision across disciplinary boundaries. In order to recruit junior researchers internationally, master classes and summer schools were regularly conducted, providing a collegial and formal framework for the rich collaborate scholarship of the Center.

The leaders of the research groups also participated in the admission of doctoral students, thus obtaining opportunities at an early stage to guide the intellectual development of their own junior researchers. The Center of Excellence also proceeded according to this principle when approving research projects, which were examined closely by an internal committee or which, beyond a certain level, had to be submitted to the Scholarly Advisory Committee. Here as well the Center was very active in assisting junior researchers shortly after graduating to realize their ideas and assume responsibility for administering their own budgets.