Are you a researcher in the humanities, cultural studies, or social sciences looking for an international research opportunity in Germany? The Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (KHK CURE) Fellowship 2027–2028 at Saarland University invites qualified researchers and eligible doctoral artists from around the world to pursue independent research projects addressing reparation, irreparability, and their cultural significance.

For the 2027–2028 academic year, the centre plans to offer up to 12 fellowships, subject to funding approval. Selected fellows will spend between six and twelve months in Saarbrücken, Germany, working on an independent research project while participating in the centre’s interdisciplinary academic community.

Fellows taking unpaid leave from their home institutions, as well as eligible independent scholars, can receive a monthly stipend of €6,100–€7,200 before taxes, depending on qualifications. Researchers who retain their regular salary may instead be eligible for an arrangement that funds a teaching replacement at their home institution.

The application deadline is 30 November 2026. Applicants should note that this is a research fellowship for qualified doctoral researchers and eligible artists, not a general scholarship for undergraduate, master’s, or MBA students.

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research, KHK CuRe, is a research centre funded under Germany’s Käte Hamburger Kolleg programme at Saarland University. These colleges bring together scholars across disciplines to advance a shared annual research theme over an academic year. Unlike department-based fellowships, KHK CuRe is explicitly interdisciplinary: its scholars come from the humanities, social sciences, and cognate fields, and are expected to engage each other’s research as much as pursue their own.

The 2027–28 cohort’s organising theme is Things in the context of reparation, exploring the role of material objects, artefacts, and physical things in debates about historical redress, colonial legacies, restitution, postcolonial justice, and the ethics of return. This is a theme of growing urgency across law, art history, anthropology, philosophy, and museum studies, and KHK CuRe invites scholars whose work engages with this thematic space from any of these disciplines.

As a KHK CuRe Fellow, you will pursue your own independent research project within the thematic framework of Things and reparation, based residentially in Saarbrücken for your fellowship period. The residential format is central: sustained presence in the kolleg enables the kind of sustained intellectual exchange that short visits cannot replicate.

Fellows are expected to contribute actively to the cohort’s intellectual life — presenting work-in-progress, responding to peers’ research in workshops and seminars, and participating in public lectures, events, and academic exchanges organised by the kolleg. The 2027–28 cohort will include up to 12 fellows, creating a compact, intensive research community for the academic year.

The KHK CuRe Fellowship supports research across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The 2027–28 theme of Things and reparation is broad enough to encompass anthropology, art history, cultural history, legal and political philosophy, museum and curatorial studies, postcolonial studies, heritage law, archaeology, and history of science — particularly insofar as these fields grapple with the moral, legal, or cultural dimensions of material things in contexts of historical redress. Cross-disciplinary and comparative projects are particularly welcome.