Fellowships at IAS CEU

We are inviting applications for the academic year 2027/28 under the Global Invisible University Fellowship program.

We offer residential fellowships to highly accomplished senior and promising young scholars seeking to spend 3-9 months in an interdisciplinary intellectual community of their peers while pursuing their own research. These scholarships are available in the social sciences and humanities, in the fields that contribute to the development of the Global Invisible University (GIU) curricular and research priorities. Residential fellows can be hosted for a 9-month period (October-June), for a 3-month short fall semester (October-December), a 5-month fall semester (October-February) or a 6-month spring semester (January-June).

Below are the brief descriptions of the fellowships we offer; for more information please refer to the relevant call for application:

Junior and Senior Residential Fellowship (core fellowships)

This is our core fellowship program. Senior and Junior Core fellows spend 3-9 months in Budapest and pursue their own research. They receive a stipend and accommodation at the Raoul Wallenberg Guesthouse from the Institute.

Artist in Residence Fellowship

We offer one Writer in Residence fellowship and one Visual Artist in Residence fellowship. These two residential fellowships (up 5 months each with a minimum stay of 3 months) are offered on a competitive basis to writers and visual artists who relate in innovative and convincing ways to the aims of GIU, in creative writing (such as poetry, prose, drama, screen and playwriting) and in various visual media, including film and digital applications. 

Residential and Non-residential Fellowships for Threatened Scholars

This fellowship is available for scholars who are at risk (loss of jobs, harassment or violence, or legal persecution) due to their political and civic positions of dissent, identity, practice of critical scholarship and exercise of academic freedom, as well as for scholars in/from zones of active military conflict that affects them immediately. Non-residential scholarships of 6 to 12 months are exclusively available to Threatened Scholars during the period of August 2027 to July 2028.  

Residential Affiliated Fellowships

Each year we host a couple of affiliated fellows. Affiliated fellows typically use their own external fellowships to spend their research period, or parts thereof, at IAS CEU. The minimum stay is 3 months. Affiliated fellows do not receive a stipend and may or may not receive housing from the Institute.

Our fellowship programs are meant to contribute to the formation of a Global Invisible University, integrating research, teaching, and civic engagement. GIU is a strategic initiative designed to build a new model of a “university for the future” that responds to the global crisis facing higher education, scholarship and production of and access to knowledge in contexts of war, displacement, autocratization, commercialization, and repression. It is an innovative transnational program combining university-level courses, mentoring, and research, by and for students and scholars threatened by the rising tide of authoritarianism and crises that constrain academia, with the aim of creating more resilient, democratic, and open societies and academic institutions.

Applicants are expected to relate to at least one of the key thematic areas of the Global Invisible University:

1. Democratization, de-democratization and re-democratization
2. Politics of history, memory and culture wars, nationalist and transnationalist discourses
3. Political economy and global inequalities
4. Human rights and justice in the context of international and comparative law
5. Crisis of multilateralism, politics and dynamics of regional and global institutions and alliances
6. The politics of the Anthropocene, climate justice, natural resources
7. Old and new media and their networks (information warfare, safer use, securitization)
8. Epistemological problems of social sciences in the digital age (the problem of evidentiary procedures, truth-claims, archival practices, “forensic social sciences”)

The current fellowship program is envisioned as the principal research arm of GIU and draws on the 15-year-long institutional tradition and practices of the Institute of Advanced Study at CEU, the base academic unit of GIU, providing its resources, networks, and research support infrastructure. We are soliciting applications from scholars who seek to be part of an experimental academic community, where individual research and concern with new modalities of knowledge production and transfer reinforce each other, in search of a way out of the current crisis of higher education worldwide.

CEU operates at two locations, with the main campus in Vienna and several research institutes and centers in Budapest, such the Blinken OSA Archivum, the Democracy Institute, the Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine, various artistic, cultural, and non-degree educational programs, and the Budapest branch of CEU Library. Budapest is one of Central Europe's most attractive cities, which is currently serving as a laboratory of re-democratization. The scholarships are also intended to generate new synergies between the fellows and other educational and civil society institutions in Hungary and in the broader region as well.

Please note that the fellowship applications are evaluated through a rigorous peer review process and the final decision is made by our independent Selection Committee. The main criterion for selection is the excellence of the proposed research and the track record of the applicant as well as the thematic relevance for the general aims of the Global Invisible University. Our fellowships are highly competitive.