Reel Borders: Film and Borderlands

Reel Borders is a five -year research project funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant, PI: Kevin Smets). It studies the interrelations between film and borders, mainly by looking at the border areas between Ireland and the UK, Morocco and Spain, and Turkey and Syria.

The project combines methods and insights from migration and border studies, film studies, and participatory and anthropological research. Among other methods, it employs participatory filmmaking to understand the experiences of people living in border areas.

Early Modern Colonialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean

Currently, the Department of Humanities at UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) hosts two pioneering research teams, granted with ERC advanced and starting grants respectively, dedicated to studying the colonial past of the Caribbean and the Pacific. Adopting decolonial and feminist perspectives, they analyze island societies that endured colonial exploitation by European powers. Their research also sheds light on the complex and contested processes of modernity’s construction and the expansion of the Western patriarchal system.

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Frontier Research

Our research can be considered frontier research because it challenges dominant narratives about colonial history and modernity by integrating decolonial and feminist perspectives. The study of island societies in the Caribbean and the Pacific has traditionally been shaped by Eurocentric frameworks, often overlooking indigenous agency, resistance, and the enduring impacts of colonial exploitation. By combining archaeology, history, and heritage studies, our projects push disciplinary boundaries to offer new, interdisciplinary insights into how colonial encounters shaped not only past societies but also contemporary global structures.

Innovating to Enhance Dialogues on Migration Policies and Practices

The INNOVATE project is funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe R&D programme. The project aims to facilitate a step change in the types, scope, forms and impacts of Migration Research to Policy (MR2P) engagement. It does so through a series of Actions that develop, test, apply and communicate Process Innovations that are grounded in the needs and interests of researchers, policy-makers and other key stakeholders, including migrants, who are engaged with migration issues across governance levels from the local to the international. It embeds these within an MR2P Co-Lab with both a ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ presence comprising a Research Exchange, Engagement Hub and Training Facility.

University of Graz – Digital Humanities

The digital preservation of and digital research into our cultural heritage is the aim of the Department of Digital Humanities. In terms of content, the semantic and formal indexing and mediation of digital representations of cultural artifacts is the central research topic of the department. One of the most recent and most interesting projects is GlossIT, analysing glosses – annotations to medieval texts – in their function as first-hand testimonies for the close linguistic and cultural connections between Insular Celtic and Latin speakers. Glosses are fingerprints of the society in which texts were composed, copied, and read. Most important, they offer insights into the multilingual and multi-ethnic environment of medieval manuscript and text production. The project acquired an ERC Consolidator Grant in late 2023.

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Another project – funded by the ERC with an Advanced Grant – explores the interaction of human and artificial intelligence in a virtual research environment for medieval studies. Computers need lots of examples to “learn” – and they need people to interpret the suggestions they make. Man and machine collaborate in investigating more than 600,000 medieval and early modern legal documents on the web portal monasterium.net. In order to properly classify these stories, you need to know what people in the past wanted to record in documents, how they did it and what they used them for. Researchers investigate European trends and regional differences in the design and use of 14th and 15th century charters. What influence did pan-European political institutions such as the Roman Church have on regional documentary practice? How did local and regional notarisation practices react to the spread of Roman law among the legal thinkers of Europe? How do the two widespread authentication practices, by seal and by notarial signature, relate to each other? The observations made on the digital representations of the documents will be related to major European events such as the Western Schism (1378-1417) or the Great Plague (1348/49) and the ensuing economic crisis.

Cutting-edge historical research is also conducted at the Department of Classics. The project COLLAPSE is questioning our notion of authorship in ancient texts, since in antiquity texts were the universal commons of all those who drew on them. This problem forms the starting point for the research. Imperial Greek literature serves as a fertile ground to re-think anonymised text production. Contrary to the assumptions of romantic genius aesthetics, the project regards authorship as a collaborative cultural practice of the Pre-Modern World. It takes up current developments, such as the popular fanfiction narratives on digital platforms, considering these approaches to canonical texts as diachronic forms of co-authorship.


Leibniz Institute of European History

The Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz is an independent research institute. Its purpose is to conduct academic research on European history. The Institute fulfils this purpose through the individual and joint research efforts of its staff and through the research scholarships and fellowships that it awards to academics both from Germany and abroad.

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In 2024, it started its new IEG Research Agenda: “Society”, “religion” together with “digitality” – and, in perspective, “environment” – will form the principal foci of the IEG’s research. The connection between these areas is maintained above all by the Europe Forum. Historical research on Europe in its cross-border and global interdependencies thus captures key processes that have had an impact in the past and continue to do so today. With a view to questions of social cohesion, religious plurality, climate change and digital transformation, they bring the insights of rigorous historical scholarship to bear on European options for action and their limits as well as suggesting alternative paths.
The research projects at the IEG jointly illuminate enduring issues from a long-term perspective. They deal with changes, ruptures and continuities and address memory and the use to which pasts are put. They are organised on a European basis, taking into account relationships and taking a comparative view of interactions on a local, regional, national, international and global level. By incorporating digital processes, historical methods are continuously expanded and conceptually developed. Scholars working at the IEG draw on their projects to contribute to the fields of society, religion and digitality. They also participate in the overarching activities and debates in the Europe Forum.


Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe

The Herder Institute supports a wide range of scientific activities on the historical and cultural development of East Central Europe through its research, knowledge transfer, documentation and digitalization departments. The focus of interest is on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. An important concern is the joint exploration of the interrelation of this core region with its neighbors (above all Germany, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia) in a comparative pan-European context. For several years now, the Digital Humanities have been a major focus of the institute’s work, both in the area of digital and social infrastructure development as well as in research and career development.

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The unique collections consist of a research library on the history and culture of East Central Europe, which now contains more than half a million media units, including a music collection, a samizdat collection and a press collection. Daily and weekly newspapers from East Central Europe have been archived since 1952 and have been evaluated for the period up to 1999 in a systematic collection of more than 5 million clippings. In addition, the Institute also has one of the best image archives with image carriers of all kinds, especially on the art and cultural history of East Central Europe (currently about 700,000 units), a map collection with about 45,000 map sheets, about 1,200 old maps and slightly more than 6,300 aerial photographs from the years between 1942 and 1945. Finally, the document collection focuses on the history of the Baltic
States and continuously collects estates, family archives, individual archival documents as well as photographed archival records (about 1,300 running meters of shelving). The materials held in stock are the starting point for our own research, close cooperation with the two universities in Giessen and Marburg in research and teaching, and close networking with numerous other Leibniz institutions (Leibniz Research Associations).

Current project-leading perspectives

Collecting, preserving, indexing and communicating
Visual history and art history
Reflection and design of digital change
Space – City – Environment
Political orders – conflict – security

Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

The Peace Research Institute Frankfurt is one of Europe’s leading peace and conflict research institutes, and the largest of its kind in Germany. We analyze the causes and patterns of conflict from the global to the local level, attempts to build and sustain peace,
and make practical recommendations on peace and conflict-related issues. We combine basic research with knowledge transfer for policy, the media, and society. To achieve this mission and as a member of the Leibniz Association, we are funded by the German federal government, the state of Hesse, and the city of Frankfurt, and also receive third-party funds.

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PRIF has built up an extensive body of knowledge on key aspects that are critical to the state and future of peace in the world. These topics, which we continuously address, include: arms control and disarmament; international norms, regimes, and organizations; armed conflict and organized violence; military and nonmilitary interventions; peacebuilding and democratization; as well as nonviolent social conflict and societal peace. These topics are investigated in PRIF’s five Research Departments (RD), which are the main research units of the institute. They represent key research fields in peace and conflict studies, dealing with questions of international security (RD I), the role of international institutions (RD II), transnational politics (RD III), peace and conflict at the intrastate level (RD IV), as well as the interaction between political globalization and local lifeworlds (RD V).

The Research Departments also host smaller Research Groups. These groups pool the expertise and coordinate research on a specific topic. Currently, Research Groups deal with emerging technologies as well as biological and chemical weapons (RD I), public international law (RD II), terrorism and radicalization (RD III), regime competition (RD IV) and African intervention politics (RD V). In contrast to the RDs, which are the key administrative research units at PRIF, these groups are smaller and more flexible – they can be established, adjusted and dissolved more easily. While embedded in individual RDs, the groups can also include members from other departments. In addition, Research Groups and individual researchers can join forces in what we call cross-cutting research areas, which address ongoing political developments and academic debates, and facilitate collaboration across the Research Departments as well as with our national and international partners.

PRIF emphasizes the dissemination of practically relevant findings to society at large. As part of our knowledge transfer strategy, we provide background information on current events and analysis for ministries, parties, NGOs, and corporations. We conceive knowledge transfer as a dialogical exchange between science and society, which also engages with ideas and inspiration from society and integrates these into scientific work.

Science and Research Centre Koper – A Hub of Mediterranean Wisdom

The Science and Research Centre Koper (ZRS Koper) works on an interdisciplinary basis, involving humanities, social and natural sciences, with special emphasis given to the research in the specific environments of the Mediterranean and the upper Adriatic region.

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The main activities are:
– basic and applied research, production of professional expertise and counseling, education, organisation of scientific meetings, publishing and editorial activities, librarianship .

ZRS Koper is actively integrating in international scientific cooperation and is connecting with many similar organisations worldwide.

Researchers are also actively involved in academic process at all three Slovene public universities, thus ensuring the transfer of research results into the educational sphere.

History of ZRS Koper
The Science and Research Centre of the Republic of Slovenia, Koper (ZRS Koper) was founded on the 1st December 1994 by the Government of the Republic of Slovenia as well as the community of coastal municipalities (as legal successor of all three coastal municipalities: Koper City Municipality, Izola Municipality and Piran Municipality) and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
During the years 2003 to 2015 ZRS Koper acted as a member of the University of Primorska and was it’s main research hub. Nine ZRS Koper institutes carried out an enviable job, many internationally recognized researchers have enabled the transfer of knowledge to dozens of study programs.
Aiming for responsible design of its own future, the ZRS Koper researchers strive for a new form of organization. Following the decision of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, a public research institute, the Science and Research Centre Koper was established on 26 November 2016.

Institut d’Études Européennes

For over 60 years, the Institut d’études européennes at the Université libre de Bruxelles (IEE-ULB) has been a leading centre for research, debate, and collaboration on European integration, institutions, and policies. Situated in Brussels, in proximity to EU institutions and involved in different policy and research networks, the IEE-ULB provides a dynamic environment for scholars, professionals, and journalists to engage with critical European issues.

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IEE-ULB’s research agenda is structured around four key thematic axes that reflect the evolving challenges of European governance. The first explores Europe as an Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice , addressing issues such as the rule of law, migration, and security. The second focuses on Europe as an Area of Economic and Social Regulation , investigating economic governance, territories and regional policy, common market and social issues. The third crosscutting axe examines Europe as a Community of Norms and Values , analyzing questions of cooperation processes, processes of identification and conflict generated by European integration and their role in the legitimization of the EU as a political entity. Finally, the fourth theme, Europe in the World, assesses the EU’s global role, its relations with neighbouring regions, and its place in international governance.

Beyond academic research, the IEE is actively developing a multi-year programme on how Europe is narrated through different perspectives, including media and journalism. This initiative aims to strengthen the ability of students and researchers to critically assess information, data, and media sources while fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange of views of the social sciences and journalism on the different ways in which facts and news on European affairs are constructed and shaped. As a host institution, the IEE-ULB is eager to support applications for residencies that explore European politics, policies, or broader societal transformations, including developments in neighbouring candidate countries.

With its strategic location, vibrant academic networks, and strong links to EU institutions and civil society, the IEE-ULB offers an ideal setting for scholars and professionals engaging with European issues. By combining cutting-edge research with real-world policy and media engagement, it continues to serve as a leading hub for those seeking to understand and shape the future of Europe.

WZB Berlin Social Science Center

The WZB Berlin Social Science Center conducts basic research on problems of modern societies in a globalized world. The research is theory-based, problem-oriented, often long-term, and mostly based on international comparisons. Around 200 scientists from various disciplines work together at the WZB, mainly from sociology, political science, economics, and law. Our research areas are dynamics of social inequalities, society, and economic dynamics, international politics and law, dynamics of political systems, migration and diversity, and political economy of development.