Call: 1 Junior and 1 Senior Fellowship Winter Term 2026/27

25 April 2025

We are awarding one Junior and one Senior Junior Fellowship in the winter term 2026/27:

Application requirement:

The call is addressed to advanced PhD students and postdoctoral researchers (up to a maximum of 4 years after the doctorate) respectively experienced researchers (postdoctoral researchers from 4 years after the doctorate, habilitated researchers, professors and emeriti). A prerequisite for an application is a research project related to notions and discourses of force/power in the arts and/or the history of culture and science.

Subject area of the call:

Hardly any field of cultural reflection can do without conceptualizations of force. Conceptions of religious or magical (creative force, magic powers), human (vis animae, impulse, willpower), political (kratos, potestas, power, rule, charisma), physical (gravity, attraction, energy), biological (procreative force, vital force, formative force), physiological (muscular force, perceptive force) or socioeconomic (labor force, buying power) forces refer to the dominance as well as to the plasticity of the concept of force and its derivatives. Since antique poetics and rhetoric, transmitted via the art and poetry doctrines of the Early Modern period, the arts in particular have strikingly often developed their performance profile with reference to the doctrines of force (creative force, imaginative force, movere). It is therefore all the more astonishing that the transitions and transfers between uses of the concept of force in the natural sciences, cultural studies, and the arts have hardly been investigated systematically. The aim of the CAS »Imaginarien der Kraft« is, to bring together a variety of disciplinary approaches to concepts of force and force-related concepts, in order to explore their emergence and transformations in the arts. Starting point is the observation that the term 'force' (Greek dynamis, Latin potentia) denotes the ability to exert effects, but that forces themselves are not perceivable. They can only be detected indirectly by their effects. The arts and reflections on them, so a guiding thesis, constitute a privileged site of engagement with the sensory presence effects of non-sensory forces.

While the first funding phase (2019-2023) focused on the transitions between natural philosophy, natural science, and aesthetics, the second funding phase of the CAS (2023-2027) will set three new focal points. In the study of aesthetic forces, the focus is on 1) their affinity to the unquantifiable forces of the numinous, 2) the relationship between European and non-European concepts of force, and 3) the creative, artistic, and literary explorations of historical and contempory practices of energy production and the energy landscapes that result from them.

Please see the calls for applications for more information on the fellowships and the annual theme of the winter term 2026/27:

>> Call Junior Fellowship for Download
>> Call Senior Fellowship for Download

For queries and more detailed information, please contact Dr. Caroline Herfert: caroline.herfert"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Please send your application by e-mail (in a single PDF file) by September 15, 2025 to: imaginarien.der.kraft"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Contact:

DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe »Imaginarien der Kraft«
Gorch-Fock-Wall 3, 1. Stock (links)
20354 Hamburg
Deutschland
imaginarien.der.kraft"AT"uni-hamburg.de
www.imaginarien-der-kraft.uni-hamburg.de