Budapest Open Society Fellowship on the topic of Illiberal Times and Spaces

The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS CEU), together with the Democracy Institute (DI) and the Blinken OSA Archivum (OSA) at the Budapest site of CEU, is pleased to launch their third joint call for applications for the Budapest Open Society Fellowship program  (formerly: Joint Budapest Fellowship). The new call for applications for the academic year 2025/26 focuses on the topic of Illiberal Times and Spaces.

In various capacities, the Democracy Institute, the Blinken OSA Archivum and the Institute for Advanced Study are engaged in a multi-year research, teaching and public program series on issues related to historical revisionism. The present call focuses on the ways current trends of illiberalism are reshaping the temporal and spatial frameworks of societies. History is rewritten to sustain self-victimizing ethnocentric grand narratives, the present is meant to be “ruled” by the autocratic leader, always adjusting the visions of the past and future to his actual political position. Social spaces are also reshaped by these illiberal projects; people are pushed out of visibility when they try to contest the regime, and urban settings are redesigned to sustain the illiberal memory politics with never-existed monuments of past glory. They also create new transnational frameworks, where the temporal and spatial axes are mixed in an innovative way, thus pitching Orbán’s Hungary as a “possible future” of the United States.

Along these lines, this thematic call is addressed to scholars, artists and media professionals from all disciplines and fields who are interested in exploring the ways in which ideologically motivated groups, politicians, experts, or public figures with an illiberal agenda seek to reshape the temporal and spatial coordinates of our societies. The call has no regional preference.

The Call for AY 2025/26 is closed.