Józef Tischner Fellowship

Fellowship Programs

Call for Applications 2024–2025

Objective

The Józef Tischner Fellowships are open to all academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences; a thematic relation to one of the Institute’s research fields is, however, strongly encouraged. The Józef Tischner Junior Fellows will be invited to spend a four-month term between September 2024 and June 2025 at the IWM to pursue their research projects.

Conditions

Postdoctoral candidates––i.e., those who have defended their PhD by the date of the fellowship application deadline––will receive a stipend of EUR 3,000 per month; candidates currently pursuing their doctoral degree will receive a stipend of EUR 2,500 per month to cover accommodation, living expenses, travel, health insurance and any incidental costs related to their stay in Vienna.

In addition, the IWM provides visiting fellows with office space, including internet access, in-house research and administrative facilities, as well as other services free of charge. The visiting fellows will join the scholarly community and participate in the activities of the Institute. Generally, fellowships start on the first day of the month and end on the last day of the month.

Eligibility

Candidates for the Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellowships

  • must be Polish citizens, Polish-American scholars or permanently reside in Poland
  • must be enrolled in a doctoral program in the humanities or social sciences or have obtained a PhD in the same fields in the past four years

Józef Tischner Senior Visiting Fellowships are granted by invitation only.

Application

Applications must be submitted through the IWM's online application form; we will be unable to consider applications sent via email.

Application materials consist of the following:

  • a brief letter of motivation that addresses how the project would benefit from time at the IWM, the connection to the IWM’s mission and research, and concrete research/writing goals during the fellowship
  • a project description (max. 550 characters)
  • a project proposal (max. 7,500 characters incl. spaces) containing a) a description of the project’s objectives, b) a discussion of the current state of the art, c) methods, and d) a work plan
  • a curriculum vitae including a list of publications
  • two letters of recommendation from scholars familiar with the applicant’s academic work (has to be submitted by the applicant together with the other application materials)

All application materials should be in English.

Important! Attached documents must be combined into a single PDF, as the online submission form only allows for one attachment. File names of attachments must use Latin characters. 

Applications are now closed. 

Selection

The finalists will be selected by a jury of experts. Applicants will be notified of the jury’s decision in the spring semester of 2024. The jury is not required to publicly justify its decisions, nor to provide applicants individual feedback on their applications.

Contact

Kasper Nowak
Fellowship Program Coordinator 
fellowships@iwm.at

Józef Tischner (1931–2000), one of the most influential Polish philosophers of the 20th century and the first chaplain of Solidarność, was founding president of the IWM. In his memory, fellowships have been awarded to junior researchers from Poland and young Polish-American scholars since 2003.

Fellowships

  • Sense in the Making: Husserl's The Origin of Geometry and the Question of Invention, -
  • Postfeminism in Poland? The Black Protests and the Women’s Strikes between Conservative Modernization and Feminist Populism, -
  • Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism (1918–1968), -
  • The Path of Despair: The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit', -
  • The Making of Emotional Socialism: Politics and Poetics of Feelings in Post-war Poland (1944–1989), -
  • Self-Learning Experiences in Early Modernity as a Space for Scientific Solidarity, -
  • Does the Western World Need Its Political Theology?, -
  • Dispensable People in Galicia in the Transformation Period (1917–1929), -
  • Between Self-Analysis and Autobiography: The Everyday Writing Practices of Freud’s Disciples and Their Impact on the Psychoanalytic Theory, -
  • Joseph Brodsky and Leonid Aronzon: Poetic Friendship, Poetic Circles, and Leningrad Underground Culture of the 1950s and 1960s, -
  • Historical Anthropography, or How People Perceive their Place in Time, Social and “Geocultural” Spaces, -
  • The Political Applications of Phenomenology, -
  • Moral Values and Civil Society: Philosophical and Political Views of Krzysztof Michalski and Marek Siemek, -
  • The Making of Holodomor in the Shadow of the Cold War: The Production and Politicization of Knowledge about the Great Ukrainian Famine, -
  • Polish Politics of Memory and the Notion of the Future in Memory Research, -
  • Enthusiastic Building, Common-Cosmopolitan Subjectivity, and the Stage of Pre-Solidarity: An Ethnographic-Historical Study on Affective Work in Poland Since Late Socialism, -
  • Crisis of Europe and the Decomposition of corpus mysticum in Late Medieval Europe, -
  • Central European – the Species on the Verge of Extinction? Identity Narratives on Examples of Czech and Polish Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, -
  • Academic Solidarity: A Philosophical Account, -
  • The Biography of Józef Tischner, -
  • Martha Nussbaum and the Uses of Imagination in Political Philosophy, -
  • Trust in the Decent Society, -
  • Evolution of Leszek Kołakowski’s Religious Thought, -
  • Philosophy of Language and Concept of "Translation"" in Secularization Theory", -
  • Ethical Moments in Making Theatre. Reclaiming Józef Tischner’s Philosophy for Performance Studies, -
  • Liberal Dilemmas:Tocqueville on Sovereignty, Nationhood and Globalization, -
  • Agnostic Secularism and the Nature of European Integration, -
  • Hannah Arendt’s early thought as a response to political theology, -
  • Psychopolitics: The Discourse of Psychiatry and Modernization Processes in Post-1989 Poland, -
  • From the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street, -
  • The Political Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, -
  • A Nation Undone: Nazi Policy and the Subjugation of Warsaw, -
  • Staging the Empire:Soviet-Polish Cultural Initiatives in Propaganda, Science and the Arts, 1943-1957, -
  • Polish and American Religious Right Movements in the Perspective of Secularization and De-privatization of Religion Theories., -
  • Populism, -
  • Civil Religion in Europe and America – Reasons for the Transatlantic ‘God Gap’, -
  • On Civic Virtue and Religion in a Liberal Political Order, -
  • The Red and the Brown: The Life and Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki, 1915-1979, -
  • National Experience. Practice and Theory of Nation in Everyday Life, -
  • Civil Society, Nationality and Religion: Allies or Enemies? The Case of Poland (1989 – 2000), -

Fellows