Humboldt Foundation awards outstanding research that focuses on refugees and migration

The Reimar Lüst award is granted to humanities scholars and social scientists from abroad who have shaped academic and cultural relations between Germany and their own countries. The award is valued at €60,000. Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, grants up to two Reimar Lüst Awards.

The historian Kateřina Čapková is a leading expert for modern Jewish history in Central and Eastern Europe, the history of the Sinti and Roma and the history of refugees and migration in the 20th century. She teaches at Charles University Prague in the Czech Republic. The primary focus of her research work is on the experiences of Jewish communities in the former Czechoslovakia during and following the Second World War. Čapková opens up new perspectives on the correlations between nationalism, minorities policy and transnational networks in Europe. The Reimar Lüst Award will enable her to undertake a research stay at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow in Leipzig.

Bala Venkat Mani works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he concentrates on modern German literature, migration and refugee research, and bibliology and library science. His interdisciplinary approach combines historical, literary and digital perspectives in order to better understand literary networks and the global circulation of knowledge. Mani’s latest book project “Tales of Unsettlement: The Global Novel in the Age of Refugees” is based on the hypothesis that refugees are playing a central role in the emergence of a new “global” novel. An analysis of the figure of the refugee since the 1940s is of vital importance for pointing up the history of racist populism and ethnonationalism. He will use the Reimar Lüst Award to undertake a research stay at the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA).

The astrophysicist Reimar Lüst was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for many years and served as President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation from 1989 to 1999. In appreciation of his life-long work to promote international exchange between scientists and scholars, the Humboldt Foundation established the Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in 2006.

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.