On 1 July 1998 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) will set up 14 new collaborative research centres and two new transfer centres. This was decided by the grants committee for these centres at its summer meeting. From July 1998 onwards, the DFG will fund a total of 266 collaborative research centres at 58 universities with about DM 548 million. One of the new collaborative research centres will be in the humanities and social sciences, while three will be set up in biology/medicine and five each in natural sciences and engineering sciences. The large number of initiatives to set up collaborative research centres has remained unchanged. Equally high is the number of applications rejected after very strict review and assessment. In the last round of decision-making, for instance, seven out of a total of 21 applications were unsuccessful.
Collaborative research centres are centres of outstanding research performance which, while having a strictly limited term - typically twelve years - and being subjected to scrupulous periodical reviews, enable costly long-term research projects to be conducted at universities. Scientists may cooperate with non-university research institutions and also with industry. Young scientists are to be given a greater opportunity to manage their own sub-projects. In its comment on the development of the collaborative research centre programme the Science Council pronounced this 30-year-old funding instrument highly successful and indispensable for university research and emphatically recommended that it should be continued.
Humanities and social sciences
The new collaborative research centre "The Weimar-Jena event, culture around 1800" to
be set up at Jena University will explore - from the perspectives of history, aesthetics and
natural sciences - this unique cultural synthesis where Enlightenment and Classicism, Idealism
and Romanticism overlapped. Under the umbrella of a new conception of cultural studies arts
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Contact: Dr. Pia Teufel
teufel@pr.dfg.d400.de
49-228-885-2376
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
19-Jun-1998