The past fifty years have witnessed significant development in the study of the structure of urban centers. Dozens of cities in a variety of geographic regions and cultural environments have been studied, and their shape and society reconstructed.

Concurrently, the disciplines of urban archaeology, urban geography and urban history were defined and developed, enabling an integrated study of historical sources, archaeological remains and the analysis of geographic, architectural and regional data.

However, the theoretical interpretation of ancient and historic cities is still conditioned by the chronological and sociological paradigms established as far back as the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, for instance, the classification of cities into Eastern, i.e. "Oriental/Muslim/Middle or Far-Eastern" cities as opposed to "Occidental", i.e. European and North American ones is based, to a large extent, on the 19th century's neo-classical interpretation of historical economy. The accepted periodization of urban history into "Biblical", "Greek", "Roman", "Medieval" or "Early Modern" periods also reflects the ideologies, theologies and identities that created them. In many cases they are culturally or ethnically conditioned and cannot be justified outside of the specific culture that created them. Urban history is sufficiently complex and continuous to sustain different cultural definitions and different types of biased periodizations. As a result, the characterization of specifically defined types of cities such as "Muslim", "Medieval" or "greek" cities became almost self-evident, and the terms themselves, let alone the periodization that created them, was rarely contested.

In light of these conceptual paradigms, our research group will examine the processes of cultural, political, social and religious changes in both past and contemporary urban contexts. Adopting a multidisciplinary apprach and a wide chronological range, the members of the group will address an array of changes in urban structures, such as the formation of new centers of political might, structural changes of the public spaces, the creation of architectural icons, and the expansion and collapse of urban tissues, all in relation to major political, cultural and religious changes.

 

The goal of our research group is to examine the changing context of procedural, representative and liberal democracy in Latin America, analyze the contesting modes of democracy that have crystallized in the region, and evaluate their implications for a redefinition of citizenship models and alliances.

Latin America has long been a laboratory for comparative research. With its 20 independent polities, it provides a shared ground for systematic analysis into the resilience or breakdown of formal democracy against the background of contesting models of citizenship.

While in the days of the Cold War these models were relatively clear-cut and impacted on the region, generating the contrasting projects of reform and revolution, in the last two decades Latin America has witnessed both a renewal of democracy and the diversification of democratic experiments. The international presence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the election of an indigenous president in Bolivia and female presidents in Chile and Argentina, and recent policy decisions in Cuba, reflect the profound changes these countries have undergone, raising questions that are of far more than just regional interest.

Our research group brings together experts on various dimensions of citizenship in Latin America with a record in comparative research to reflect on the challenges affeting liberal democracies, as derived from the shift from corporatist to neo-liberal citizenship regimes; the increasing recognition of group rights and multiculturalism, evident with the potent rise of new indigenous movements; the emergence of participatory forms of anti-politics in situations of policy ineffectiveness and institutional collapse; the increasing use of plebiscitary democracy as a means of attaining political legitimacy; and the persistent challenge of mass citizen mobilization to existing forms of limited democracy.

 

 

RG size is flexible, ranging from 5-8 core fellows, and each RG can include one postdoctoral fellow. Scholars spend their residency at the IIAS, located at the Edmond J. Safra Campus in Givat Ram, Jerusalem. The IIAS provides its fellows and visiting scholars with a nurturing and stimulating academic environment, as well as administrative support. Fellows from abroad receive a generous fellowship and family accommodation.

 What is a Research Group?

Each RG brings together a diverse group of scholars to engage in research questions of common interest. The group fellows benefit from integrative thinking and rich dialogue, while expanding individual fellows’ research. Our expectation is that the RG’s period of residence will result in creative and original research that will be shared with the international research community.

Former fellows may apply once 10 years have elapsed from the end of their previous term to the beginning of the academic year of their Fellowship.

 

Period of Residence

The IIAS academic year runs from September 1 to June 30. Proposals should include a request for a five- or ten-month residency period. Exceptions may be granted to Research Groups to be in residence for a three-month period (e.g. for experimental sciences). These are the possible options:

• The ten-month residencies begin September 1

• The five-month residencies begin September 1 or February 1

• The three-month residencies begin September 1, February 1, or May 1

Application Deadline and Notification

The online system will open for submission on September 1, 2025.
The deadline for application submission is December 1, 2025 (midnight).

Initiators are welcome to consult with the IIAS Director prior to submitting the proposal. To schedule a meeting please fill in the form HERE.

The IIAS Academic Committee announces its decisions regarding the selected proposals within seven months of the submission deadline. Rejected proposals may be resubmitted.

Application Information >

Back to Research Groups >

 

 

Fellows spend their residency at the IIAS, located at the Edmond J. Safra Givat Ram campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The IIAS provides fellows with a nurturing and stimulating academic environment, as well as administrative support. Fellows from abroad receive a generous fellowship and subsidized accommodation.

Our expectation is that the fellow’s residency will result in creative and original research that can be shared with the international research community.

Eligibility to Apply

Scholars may be from Israel or abroad and must have a tenured position with an academic research institution. 
Former fellows may apply for an individual fellowship once 10 years have elapsed from the end of their previous term by the beginning of the academic year of their fellowship. This fellowship is not open to postdoctoral researchers.

Period of Residence

The IIAS academic year runs from September 1 to June 30. Residencies are open for either 10 months or 5 months and the proposal should contain the requested period of residency according to the following options:

10-month residencies beginning September 1

5-month residencies beginning September 1 or February 1

Application and Notification Timeline

Applications are to be submitted online between September 1 - December 1 (midnight).

In the online form, the applicant is required to submit the following details:

1. Personal information
2. A list of 4 international experts in the candidate’s field and their contact information

In addition to the above, the applicant should provide the following documents:

1. Letter of Intent (up to 1000 words): description of the project and justification
2. Professional CV and a full list of publications

Incomplete applications will not be considered.

The deadline to submit applications is December 1, 2025 (midnight).

The IIAS Academic Committee announces its decisions regarding
the selected proposals within seven months of the submission deadline.

 

Application Information >

 

 

Goals

The aim of the CAT initiative is to foster networks of excellent early-career researchers dedicated to devising new ideas to understand and to tackle current or emerging societal challenges. Although the programme has a strong focus on the societal relevance of the projects, it is entirely blue sky, bottom-up and non-thematic. CAT encourages a collaboration with stakeholders outside academia (industry, policymakers, NGOs…) who are willing to support or engage in innovative research initiatives.

In order to engage in fruitful discussions and mature their ideas, the groups will be given the opportunity to meet for short stays in different participating institutes, and to be put in contact with the institutes’ fellows and local research communities.

With few guidelines and a very light application process, CAT is designed to maximize the creativity of research groups. This call has been incubated in the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study (NETIAS) and also involves institutes beyond the network. The collaboration between several institutes in different countries aims at giving these groups access to a great variety of high-level thinkers and researchers in order to go beyond the current frontiers of knowledge and to develop highly innovative ideas on how to address very complex societal issues.

Support

CAT will provide teams of early-career researchers (three to five persons) time and space for thought and discussion in the best research environments Europe has to offer. The groups may include one representative of a stakeholder organization related to the theme of the project. During a period of up to three years, teams will benefit from a series of short stays (i.e. between one and two weeks, two to three times a year, for a maximum of six stays) in institutes participating in the program (see list below). Online meetings and digital research stays at the institutes are possible alternatives to onsite stays and can complete the work and time plan of CAT groups.

CAT will cover travel and accommodation expenses for the team meetings/short work stays in the participating institutes. CAT will not fund salaries or research-related expenses.

The participating institutes will support the teams by connecting them with the most knowledgeable and experienced researchers onsite as well as digitally, and by helping them valorise the obtained results through their legitimating channels. During their stay, CAT teams will benefit from the institutes’ amenities and conviviality for work and exchanges. Discussions at the institutes will provide a unique sounding board for innovative ideas and will give valuable feedback.

Obligations for CAT groups

At mid-term, the continuation of the institute’s support to the team’s work will be subject to approval after evaluation of a short progress report.

At the end of their project, in addition to the organization of (a) final meeting(s) presenting the results, the CAT teams will be expected to produce a final report in the form of a text, video, website or other media, that will be made public.

In keeping with the policies of the participating institutes, the researchers keep the intellectual property rights to their work.

Eligibility criteria

The project must address emergent societal issues.

• The Principal Investigator (team leader) must have a stable research position in a European (EU as well as UK and associated countries) higher education and/or research institution for the entire duration of the project.
• S/he must have obtained a PhD between January 2016 and September 2025.          
• No team member should have obtained his/her PhD before January 2016. Doctoral researchers may also participate.
• The eligibility can be extended beyond 10 years after the PhD for any member of the group for certain properly documented circumstances such as maternity and paternity leaves, clinical training, long-term illness, national service, natural disaster or seeking asylum.
• There is no specific diploma or age requirement for representatives of stakeholder organizations.
• Each team should include participants from at least two different countries (current workplace, including non-European countries; any nationality).
• The team of 3 to 5 persons (stakeholders included) must be fully constituted, with CVs of all members named in the proposal.
•  

Applications

Please submit your application documents in English as PDF files (the various parts of the application may be sent as one PDF). Applications should include the following materials:

1. a 300-word abstract;
2. a 3000-word max project proposal (references not included in the count) OR a video of 15 min max (in this case, please include the web link in the abstract), describing the team’s research question and how it plans to address it. The team’s motivation as well as the societal issues addressed and the interdisciplinary aspects of the project should be specified;
3. a work plan for the whole project duration, including meetings (tentative dates and possibly preferred hosting IAS) and activities with an indicative calendar;
4. a short description of the team
5. CVs for each participant and an indication of where they will travel from to the meetings; 
6. letters of support: at least two letters from academic researchers; additional letters from a stakeholders outside academia are encouraged.

Incomplete applications will not be considered.

Submit proposals via the online application platform.  

Selection and evaluation process

The proposals will be examined by the participating institutes and peer-reviewed by experts. In the spirit of a bottom-up and open call, the way the teams understand the call and design their proposal is one assessment criterion. Other criteria include the academic quality and interdisciplinarity of the proposal and its societal relevance, the quality of the team, the organization and feasibility of the work plan and the innovativeness of the approach to the issue at stake.

The CAT selection committee will distribute stays of teams to the various participating institutes. Teams may suggest specific participating institutes, providing the reasons, but the final decision will be taken by the selection committee. Selected projects will be given a binding list of institutes that can host them. This list is non-negotiable.

The institutes will discuss the dates of planned meetings with the teams.

Non-selected projects will not receive feedback on the reasons for rejection.

Questions can be directed to: cat@savion.huji.ac.il  (Ms. Keren Rechnitzer)

Schedule

Deadline for applications: 14 October 2025, 15:00 CET

Successful applications will be notified by the end of January, 2026

Stays in participating institutes will take place between January 2026 and December 2028.

 Institutes Participating in the 2026 call for applications:

Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Aarhus
CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH, Germany
CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY AT THE NORWEGIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND LETTERS, Norway
CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA, Bulgaria
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, United Kingdom
COLLEGIUM DE LYON, France
COLLEGIUM HELVETICUM, Switzerland
FREIBURG INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES, Germany
HAMBURG INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, Germany
HANSE-WISSENSCHAFTSKOLLEG, Germany
HELSINKI COLLEGIUM FOR ADVANCED STUDIES, Finland
IMÉRA - INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, France
INSTITUT FÜR DIE WISSENSCHAFTEN VOM MENSCHEN, Austria
INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE HUMANITIES, United Kingdom
Institute for Advanced Study at CEU, Budapest
INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES OF BOLOGNA, Italy
Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem
Madrid Institute for Advanced Study, Madrid
NANTES INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, France
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam
NEW EUROPE COLLEGE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, Romania
Paris Institute for Advanced Study, Paris
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin
Zukunftskolleg, Konstanz
Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions, Montpellier
Scienza Nuova, Torino

Arabia (the Arabian Peninsula) may no longer be terra incognita, but many aspects of its history remain unknown. The study of the history and culture of this territory is still in its infancy. One of the difficulties in properly evaluating the historical evidence about the ancient Near East is that modern Europeans or westerners approaching it inevitably do it with a host of confused and half-formed preconceptions about the "Orient", as Fergus Millar has noted in his book The Roman Near East 31 BC - AD 337.

In the last three decades an ever growing amount of new archaeological data, including a wealth of new inscriptions in many languages and scripts (Akkadian, Aramaic, Nabataean and South Arabian) has been gathered from sites in Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, the Persian Gulf, Sinai, the Negev, Jordan and Syria, as well as from sites of the cultures bordering with Arabia. Moreover, many texts in classical Arabic are now more accessible than ever before through various electronic media.

The group will evaluate the state of our knowledge about Arabia and the prospects for future research.

 

 

Contemporary critical theory, which highlights the creative dimension of the reading process, is increasingly reorienting the study of the history of scriptural interpretation, situating it within the flux of literary and cultural movements at large. This international research group brings together scholars of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretation to conduct a close comparative analysis of shifting encounters with Scripture in three overlapping cultures. Drawing upon diverse yet complimentary perspectives, the participants in this group will investigate five fundamental subjects:

a. The critical role that interpretation played in the formation of Sacred Scripture;

b. Changing conceptions of the "plain sense" of Scripture;

c. The ways in which classical rhetoric and poetics informed scriptural interpretation;

d. Tensions created by the need to transplant Scripture into new linguistic media;

e. The ways in which the Bible has been reconfigured in literature, art and scholarship.

 

 

This research group will explore new and important developments in Category theory, Topology, Representation theory and Physics.

 

The last decade has seen the emergence and growth of a new interdisciplinary field of research often termed "Algorithmic Game Theory". This field lies at the crossroads of computer science, game theory, and economics; a combination which is necessary for addressing many of the challenges posed by the Internet. Not only is this field full of intellectual excitement internally, and not only has it already begun to intellectually influence the three parent disciplines, but it also has significant implications for the Internet, as evidenced by the large number of researchers in the field hired by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

At the approximate age of ten years, it seems that the field of Algorithmic Game Theory is maturing. The goal of this group is to elucidate the main challenges of the field and attempt to chart the future course of the field for the next decade.

Some research topics that will be explored:

- Networks with contagious risk, the different aspects of how the evaluation of the Generalized Second Price mechanisms are used for selling ads on the Internet, and the understanding of the performance of simple auctions and modeling auctions used in practice (Eva Tardos)

- Interviewing in stable matching problems and cost-sharing mechanisms (Nicole Immorlica)

- Sketching valuation functions, the equilibria of simple market mechanisms, and optimal multi-item auctions (Noam Nisan)

- Auction design for agents with uncertain, private values (Anna Karlin)

- A general framework for computing optimal correlated equilibria in compact games, computing Nash equilibria of action-graph games via support enumeration, mechanical design and auctions, and computational equilibrium analysis of voting games (Kevin Leyton-Brown)

- Envy-free mechanisms for multiunit auctions with budgets, cost sharing games with capacitated network links, and game theoretic perspectives of the facility location problem (Michal Feldman)

- Bargaining in networks (Amos Fiat)

 

The concept of computation plays a major role in the current research of brain function. As Peter Stern and John Travis wrote in "Of Bytes and Brains" in Science (2006:75), "Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behaviour of the nervous system". Another typical statement of the centrality of computation to the study of the brain can be found in Christof Koch's introduction to his book, The Biophysics of Computation: "The brain computes! This is accepted as a truism by the majority of neuroscientists engaged in discovering the principles employed in the design and operation of nervous systems".

However, the instrumental and explanatory role of the notion of computation in neuroscience is still in need of analysis and clarification. There are various different ways in which computational models and the notion of computation are applied in the study of the brain, and it is important for these to be distinguished and assessed. For example, as attested by the two quotations in the previous paragraph, the term "computational neuroscience" may refer to two different enterprises: Stern and Travis talk of the extensive use of computer models and simulations in the study of brain functions, while Koch gives expression to the view that the modelled system itself, i.e. the brain, computes. Both perspectives are part of what is one of the major scientific projects of our time -- the effort to explain how the brain, as a physical systme, works. However, together these two perspectives manifest a duality that is not found in other sciences, where e.g. stomachs, planetary systems, and tornadoes are studied through the use of computational models and simulations, but are not perceived as computing systems.

Thus what is called for is a systematic, philosophical analysis of the role of computation in neuroscience. What is the exact role of computer models and simulations in brain research? What is the explanatory role of the view that the brain itself performs computations? How are the two enterprises (of using computer models in brain research, and of viewing the brain as a computer) related: Do they employ the same concept of computation? Are they components of a wider exaplanatory framework? These are the questions that our research group set out to consider, discuss, and offer answers to.