The postdoctoral fellowship program is conceived as the main element of the project 'Europe in the Middle East - the Middle East in Europe'. Each year 10 fellowships shall be granted, on the basis of an international competition, to postdoctoral students to fund projects of their own choice. These postdoctoral fellowships are mainly addressed to young researchers from the Middle East who wish to explore issues related to one field of research within the current projects run in Berlin. Scholarships are also available to scholars from the cultural and social sciences in other countries who are interested in working together within the suggested framework.

The fellowship program is instrumental in anchoring individual and specific themes and case studies in the framework of the fields of research and the project as a whole. It is crucial for arriving at a meaningful and fruitful scholarly dialogue with researchers from the Middle East. In Berlin the postdoctoral fellows will be integrated, in accordance with their disciplinary fields or themes, into one of the university or extra-university research institutes connected to the project in the way mentioned in the sketches of the fields of research above. This will provide them the opportunity to advance their own research topics in close communication with Berlin colleagues working in similar disciplinary frameworks and areas of research. The fellows’ participation will in turn also contribute to the specific disciplinary questions raised in respective research groups and encourage exchange with scholars working in those disciplines relevant for the four fields of research, such as Church History, Jewish Studies, and Patristics (Perspectives on the Qur’an), Urban History and Political Philosophy (Cities Compared), Literary Studies, and Comparative Literature (Travelling Traditions), and Political Science, Philosophy, History, and Islamic Studies (Islamic Discourses Contested).

The scholarships are generally fixed for a 10-months-period, but are also available in exceptional cases for shorter periods of at least 3 months and can be prolonged. It is expected that the fellows of the project assume responsibilities within their particular project groups and in regard to the project as a whole. The fellows participate actively through presentations of their work in the Berlin Seminar.