“This first funding round indicates that this format acts as a kind of seismograph for the common research interests of researchers among the Una Europa partners,” says Dr. Herbert Grieshop, Director of International Affairs at Freie Universität Berlin, who coordinated the competition together with Emily Palmer, Secretary General of Una Europa.

Two of the twelve projects involve researchers from all eight Una Europa universities at once: In the selected project “One Health as an emerging focus area for Una Europa” (UNA-OH), the participating researchers from different fields deal with the topic of health risks in connection with climate change and urbanization. The second project involving the entire network deals with the dialogue between political decision makers and researchers. The seed funding will be used to set up an interdisciplinary Una Europa research group on the topic of global governance.

Researchers at Freie Universität are also involved in the projects “Colorful Souls. Sensibilities, Materialities and Symbolisms in the Colors of the Middle Ages (400-1500)” and “Dante and the Multiplicities of Cultures in Medieval Europe.”  The first project aims to build an international and interdisciplinary network that analyzes color in the Middle Ages from different perspectives. In the second project, researchers investigate the pluralistic form of Dante Allighierie’s oeuvre, in particular the coexistence of different cultures in Dante’s texts, including scholarship and popular culture, Latin and vernacular culture, university and non-academic culture, and spiritual cultures and cultures of the body.

With the seed funding Una Europa aims to incentivize long-term cooperation within the Una Europa alliance. The seed funding competition is to take place once a year. It is open to researchers from the participating universities. The next application period for projects in 2021 is expected to open in late June.

Una Europa unites leading research universities from eight European countries that have set themselves the goal of creating a European network, increasingly linking their offerings, and in which excellence in research is connected to transnational learning and innovative, critical thinking. The eight partner universities are Freie Universität Berlin, Alma Mater Studiorum – Universitá di Bologna, University of Edinburgh, Helsingin Yliopisto, Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakau, KU Leuven, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.