Academy in Exile

Academy in Exile offers scholars who are threatened in their home countries because of their academic or civic engagement for human rights, peace and democracy the opportunity to resume their research abroad.

Academy in Exile provides a forum for reflecting on the pressing challenges to intellectual life, critical thinking, reason, social justice and diversity that are facing us today and that define the parameters of academy freedom.

Academy in Exile fellowships afford scholars the opportunity to continue their careers in Germany and to work on a research project of their own choosing in a multidisciplinary environment. Fellows contribute to and shape the research agenda and intellectual profile of the Academy generally.

Academy in Exile was founded in 2017 as a joint initiative of the Institute for Turkish Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen and the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Volkswagen Foundation provided the start-up funding. IIE-SRF and the Freudenberg Foundation granted further funding. Since early 2019, Academy in Exile hosts a new cohort of scholars at the Freie Universität Berlin with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Fellowships

Academy in Exile is based on a proven model that creates multidisciplinary cohorts of scholars around a unified theme, with the aim of enabling persecuted scholars to collaborate with each other. As of April 2022, a total of 56 scholars were awarded with long-term fellowships of 12 to 24 months or with short-term emergency stipends of three months.

Online courses

Online courses developed by Academy in Exile are being co-authored by scholars banished from academic life in their home countries. Across borders and disciplines, scholars collaborate to shape widely accessible, pioneering pedagogical tools for higher education. The first courses were offered online in 2019. All course videos can be accessed here.

Conferences and workshops

Academy in Exile creates public fora for the dissemination of its intellectual work. An inaugural international conference was held in October 18-19, 2018 at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen (KWI) on the topic of “Exile and Academic Freedom Today”. A diverse audience of scholars, students, and members of the public shared theoretical and personal insights into exile and reported on threats to academic freedom around the globe. The conference also created a particular synergy for identifying gaps in the existing support mechanisms for exiled scholars, and for discussing new models of support such as the one provided by Academy in Exile.  Click here for the conference program.

Academy in Exile hosted a second international conference on “Critical Thinking” on January 16 and 17, 2020 at Freie Universität Berlin. Click here for the conference program.

Academy in Exile’s third international conference on “The Unrecognized Genocide: Dersim 1937–1938” took place on November 18-20, 2021. Click here for the conference program.

Publications

Academy in Exile started a series with transcript to publish monographs and edited volumes, edited by Vanessa Agnew (Universität Duisburg-Essen/ The Australian National University), Kader Konuk (Universität Duisburg-Essen), and Egemen Özbek (Universität Duisburg-Essen). The first volume of the series entitled Refugee Routes (2020) is edited by Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, and Jane O. Newman (University of California Irvine). A new volume, Academics in Exile, is edited by Vera Axyonova (Universität Wien), Florian Kohstall (Freie Universität Berlin), and Carola Richter (Freie Universität Berlin) and was published in June 2022.