Through the UDE Postdoc Seed Funding scheme, the University of Duisburg-Essen supports outstanding research projects of early career researchers. In the 41st funding round, two researchers from the fields of engineering and the humanities are receiving a total of 49,620 euros to further develop their projects and lay the foundations for future applications for third-party funding.

Anxiety is not only one of the most common mental health issues worldwide today – it also played a defining role in the emergence of the colonial world order in the early modern period. In her project ‘Uneasy Encounters: Anxiety in the Colonial Archive, 1492–1740’, Dr Sonja Pyykkö (Faculty of Humanities, Anglophone Studies) investigates anxiety as an epistemic emotion that shaped how colonial subjects understood themselves in relation to each other and their environment. The project combines the history of emotions with postcolonial literary and cultural studies and opens up new perspectives on colonial systems of knowledge (grant amount: €30,000).

Both the increasingly globalized job market and the continuous advancement of academia require graduates from research-focused master programmes with competencies in more than one culture and language. By guiding students towards independent, competitive research projects and by teaching exclusively in English, students’ intercultural competencies (esp. in terms of Anglophone Popular Culture) as well as their problem-solving skills are advanced and strengthened. Since organised thinking and theoretically informed approaches to complex problems  are necessary for both areas, the MA programme prepares students for a career in the academia as well as the job market beyond the university. Read more