Roundtable ‘Grant Application - Experiences and Strategies’

Abstract

Since the 2000s, the German academic system has seen a steady rise of third-party funding for research, driven by among others, initiatives for excellence and new public management governance schemes at German institutions of higher education. Leipzig University is no exception here. According to recent reports, 223 million Euros of external funding support the university’s research projects and its long-term visions.
Among its 5.610 employees, a considerable number of (often young) researchers in their early careers are members of research programs, centres and collaborations that are highly attractive but non-permanent in their job positions.
The Research Centre Global Dynamics is a prime example of this trend and hosts a multitude of research initiatives and young scholars. Its rich experiences in generating, profiling and administering research projects with doctoral students, PostDoc-researchers and research teams is renowned and it will thus be reviewed here.

This roundtable offers the opportunity to exchange experiences, to get to know about challenges and learn how to deal with them, to avoid little traps and elegantly circumvent difficulties. Needles to say that there is no shopping list to simply work through for successful applications – but profiting from others’ insights is a first step towards success. You are warmly invited to join this exchange experience that goes beyond formal training of soft skills – and to deepen it with a concluding get-together.

Biographical Note

Matthias Middell (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Matthias Middell is professor of cultural history and Director of the Global and European Studies Institute as well as spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Centre 1199 and the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics. Since 1991 he serves as editor of Comparativ. Journal of Global History and since 2015 he sits on the board of the International Committee of Historical Sciences.

Martina Keilbach (Global and European Studies Institute, Leipzig University)

Martina Keilbach has been supervising doctoral programmes in the humanities and social sciences at Leipzig University since 2002. She has been the academic coordinator of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies since 2016 and head of the career development programme at the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (FGZ) since 2020. She studied sociology and German studies in Heidelberg and Leipzig and received her doctorate in comparative cultural history in Leipzig in 2009. Her research interests include the social and cultural history of modern Europe, the history of the welfare state in Europe and gender studies.

Jens Herpolsheimer (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Jens Herpolsheimer studied African Studies in Leipzig, Bordeaux, and Lisbon. Subsequently, continuing research initiated during his master’s, he worked on cooperation dynamics at the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP). Since 2016, he is a researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1199) “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”, at Leipzig University. In this context, he has completed his PhD, focusing on intervention practices of African regional organizations and their spatializing effects. Since January 2020, Jens Herpolsheimer is a postdoctoral researcher at the SFB 1199, studying the practices of inter-regionalism between different actors at African regional organizations and the European Union. These issues reflect his more general research interests, among other things, including the politics and practices of peace and security in Africa, Lusophony, and comparative regionalism.

Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez studies English and Spanish. Her doctoral dissertation investigated literary translations of Stephen Crane stories as cultural products at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies and translation studies. As her habilitation project, she researched the border zone between the United States and Mexico as a culturally productive space that has played an important role in redefining concepts of nation and national culture. Since her graduation, she has worked at the universities of Leipzig, Göttingen, Bielefeld, Bayreuth, Groningen, and Leipzig, and was a guest professor at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2009). She also spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar and 6 months at the State University of New York, Binghamton as a Fulbright grantee, and was appointed as the professor for American Studies and Minority Studies at ASL in 2010.

Steffi Marung (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Steffi Marung is director of the Global and European Studies Institute of Leipzig University and PI of “’Free radicals’? Political mobilities and post-colonial processes of re-spatialization in the second half of the 20th century“ at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 at Leipzig University.

Specializing on global connections of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, she teaches global history at Leipzig and Addis Ababa University. Holding a PhD in Global Studies from Leipzig University, she studied political science and German literature in Halle, Berlin and Prague. Currently, her research addresses more broadly socialist mobilities of activists and experts from Eastern Europe and the Global South during the 20th century, as well as debates on international development with a focus on the “agrarian question”, while she works on a book project investigating Soviet African Studies during the Cold War.