The present call is for up to ten (10) individual residential fellowships for 3-12 months each and for up to two (2) tandem residential fellowships for 3-6 months each for the academic year 2023/2024. The starting date of a fellowship is generally handled flexibly, however, we strongly encourage to set the starting date on either 1st of June 2023, 1st of August 2023 or 1st of January 2024. The latest possible date for the end of a fellowship is the 31st of July 2024.
The call is open to scholars (both on junior and senior levels) who have been awarded their doctoral degree at least three months before the start of the fellowship. Individual residential fellowships will allow researchers to conduct a project of their own choice, connected to MIASA’s thematic research areas. A tandem is composed of a team of two researchers – one who is based in an African country and one who is based in Germany – who apply together with a joint research topic, addressing MIASA’s overarching aims.
Projects can be at conceptional stage, mid-term phase or final stage (analyzing data, writing up findings). Fellowships are residential with only shorter absences possible and with only limited funds to support activities such as field work trips. The selection is made by MIASA’s distinguished international Academic Advisory Board in a strictly merit-based selection process. The all-important selection criteria are the academic excellence of the applicant and the fellowship proposal. MIASA is committed to inclusion, gender equality, and family friendliness. The MIASA fellowship program thus aims for gender parity and promotes affirmative action policies.
The Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) is dedicated to research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, with ‘Sustainable Governance’ as its central topic. Our main thematic corridors are conflict and sustainable peace, democracy and environmental transformation. We are also interested in a wide range of intersectional sub-topics, such as landownership and acquisition, migration and mobility, restitution of cultural objects, African cities, human rights and other related themes. MIASA is committed to reduce global asymmetries in knowledge production, to promote female scholarship and to bridge cultural divides.
MIASA supports academic exchange across existing boundaries: between disciplines, between different cultures and countries, between established and early-career researchers. Furthermore, MIASA engages in activities opening the research community to society, politics, and the arts. Individual fellows are part of this community, and profit from the lively research environment of the University of Ghana. Applications for fellowships should indicate how the research project contributes to the activities at MIASA and, more broadly, to the academic life on Legon campus.
MIASA offers time and space for supporting innovative academic projects of top international quality. MIASA serves as a hub for exchange, networking and collaboration amongst leading researchers from Germany, Ghana, Africa, Europe and elsewhere in the world. The institute is located on the beautiful campus of the University of Ghana (UG) at Legon (Accra), and has been implemented in collaboration with four German partners - the University of Freiburg, the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and the German Historical Institute Paris (GHIP). It is sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research with co-funding of the University of Ghana.
Detailed call: https://www.ug.edu.gh/mias-africa/open-calls