Duke Ernst Scholarship Programme at the Gotha research campus secured for another five years

The scholarship programme was funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation from 2004 to 2019, with the Ernst Abbe Foundation taking over funding in 2020. Since 2004, the programme has enabled more than 400 researchers from all over the world to spend research periods in Gotha. A stay of just a few months often results in a long-lasting interest in Gotha's collections and topics. A number of former students of the programme have returned to Gotha after their stay with a third-party funded project lasting several years or have even taken up permanent appointments there. Others send their doctoral candidates back to Gotha - now as professors.

A wide range of further scholarships have also developed around the HES in Gotha in recent years: for example, the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection has been running a programme to support early-stage researchers from the University of Mekelle in northern Ethiopia since 2021, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. This initiative is the brainchild of former Duke Ernst scholarship holder Dr Wolbert Smidt (Friedrich Schiller University Jena/Mekelle University). The Gerda Henkel Foundation has also been funding the innovative Tandem Scholarship for the Global History of Ideas at the Gotha Research Centre since 2024. This centres on a collaborative format of academic work in which two researchers from different contexts complement each other with their specialist and linguistic skills in order to work on a joint project. This year's fellows, Dr Eleonora Travanti and Dr Zahra Donyai, met as fellows of a state programme in Gotha. Since 2021, the Gotha Research Library has also hosted a writer every year to research the collections for new fiction or drama projects or to gain inspiration. The Library Scholarship for Literary Research is funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Thuringia, the “Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen”, the Friends of the Gotha Research Library and the Gotha Research Centre. Since 2024, the Dorothee Wilms Foundation has also been funding a scholarship for post-doctoral researchers from Eastern Europe who wish to work with early modern collections at the Gotha, Halle and Wolfenbüttel sites. And the Dr Fritz Wiedemann Foundation has been supporting the latest funding format at the research campus, the Luise Dorothea Scholarship for Court Culture Research.