Foreword
What a year! A lot has happened – and there is so much to tell!
Eleven fellows with a new position, two new ERC grants, eleven of our fellows are Emmy Noether grantees and four hold a Heisenberg Fellowship/Professorship; we have welcomed three new 5-year Research Fellows, one 2-year Postdoctoral Fellow and eight ZUKOnnect/Herz Fellows; we have ongoing collaborations both across the world and at local level: Tokyo, Jerusalem, Stuttgart, Tuttlingen… I’m losing count!
It’s good to take a break, just for a coffee or a cup of tea and a biscuit, relax and use the turn of the year to review the past one. After all, yearbooks are for browsing! Pick them up, put them down, make use of them, enjoy them page by page. But we wouldn’t be the Zukunftskolleg if we did the same as everyone else – or even the same as we ourselves did last year! On the other hand: we want to preserve our own traditions, and something becomes a tradition when it happens for the second time… And so this year for the second time, you are not holding in your hands a printed yearbook but a booklet that accompanies our digital annual report and presents in a nutshell 16 stories about the Zukunftskolleg. However, to allow these stories to “unfold” even further, we need the help of the internet! (Almost) no paper, (almost) no traditional paper mail with a big carbon footprint, only (hopefully environmentally friendly) electrical energy. But everyone is different! And so we fully appreciate that if you don’t like your computer screen (who does?) or you need something weighty to keep your coffee table in place, no problem: you can download our annual report or else ask us for a printed copy which we’ll then send to you!
Coming back to traditions and their aim: the Zukunftskolleg has been an Institute for Advanced Study for about 16 years now, with one clear goal and vision: to offer the best environment for researchers at an early stage of their careers, after a doctoral degree and before a tenured position, so that they can undertake their own independent research. Research without disciplinary borders, in an intergenerational, international setting, but embedded within the University of Konstanz and its departments. This goal has remained unchanged over the years, but we must finetune our work to a changing and evolving academic and societal environment.
In this way, we are building a Zukunftskolleg that enables unexpected contacts, fortuitous encounters, unforeseen ideas and ingenious breakthroughs of the sort that cannot be planned, that originate off the beaten track.
The Zukunftskolleg can be seen as an interdisciplinary group of individuals – academics each working in their own research area – or as a structure of intertwined networks – consisting of interactions between academics. The two belong together – what we do is create a productive and stimulating environment that encompasses both, people and networks, with the aim of promoting the research ideas and academic leaders of tomorrow.
This annual report shows you the research ideas developed in the past year, the networks created and the great people we have welcomed. Like in 2022, the report is divided into 16 stories: stories about the successful careers and projects of selected fellows, stories about new projects, people and formats, and stories about achievements and events in the past year.
On behalf of the entire Zukunftskolleg, I hope you enjoy clicking through it and wish you happy reading!
Yours,
Giovanni Galizia