Collaborative Research Centers (CRCs) Hosted by or with Participation by Freie Universität Won New or Extended Funding
Second and third funding phases of extended projects / Maximum duration twelve years
№ 088/2020 from May 29, 2020
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved funding for three (Transregional) Collaborative Research Centers (CRC) or (TRR) hosted by or with participation by Freie Universität Berlin. With the extended funding, the Collaborative Research Center 980 “Episteme in Motion. Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period,” led by spokesperson Professor Gyburg Uhlmann at the Institute of Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures, Freie Universität Berlin, will enter its third funding phase and thus reach the maximum funding period of twelve years.
Extended funding was also approved for the Transregional Collaborative Research Center CRC 183, “Entangled States of Matter,” with Freie Universität as co-host (University of Cologne; spokesperson at Freie Universität: Professor Piet Brouwer, Department of Physics) and Transregional Collaborative Research Center TRR 186 (University of Heidelberg; spokesperson at Freie Universität: Professor Christian Freund, Institute of Biochemistry). Two scientists at Freie Universität Berlin, Professor Günter M. Ziegler (Institute of Mathematics and president of Freie Universität) and Professor Konrad Polthier (Institute of Mathematics) are involved in the Transregional Collaborative Research Center TRR 109 “Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics,” which is hosted by Technische Universität Berlin and TU Munich and has been approved for another funding period. Funding was granted for a new CRC “FONDA – Grundlagen von Workflows für die Analyse großer naturwissenschaftlicher Daten” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Professor Knut Reinert from the Institute of Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin is involved in this CRC.
According to the DFG, Collaborative Research Centers allow researchers to tackle innovative, challenging, complex, and long-term research undertakings by working together across universities. They are intended to enable institutional priority area development and structural development within the applicant universities. The CRCs can be funded for a maximum of twelve years. As of July 2020, the DFG will be funding a total of 274 CRCs.
Knowledge in Motion
The researchers within the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion” are dedicated to the examination of processes of knowledge change in European and in non-European pre-modern cultures. They conduct research on processes of long-term knowledge movements in specific historical constellations and have developed a set of tools for the description of such processes. The basic thesis is that with regard to cultures before 1750 – be it in self-descriptions or in later (external) descriptions – there is a tendency to portray the knowledge of these cultures as resistant to change but that in fact these cultures were subject to constant processes of knowledge change.
This transdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center brings together scholars from Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and since the second funding period, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Technische Universität Darmstadt. With 19 subprojects involving a total of 55 employees, it is one of the largest Collaborative Research Centers in the fields of humanities, cultural studies, and history. It will be funded for another four years with a total of more than eleven million euros. This means that the science podcast Hinter den Dingen, which describes 5,000 years of the history of knowledge based on objects in Berlin's museums, can be continued.