Christoph Möllers is Professor for Public Law and Philosophy of Law at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Along with his highly respected publication Staat als Argument (The State as Argument, Munich 2000), Die Möglichkeit der Normen (The Possibility of Norms, Berlin 2015), Freiheitsgrade. Elemente einer liberalen politischen Mechanik (Degrees of Freedom. Elements of a Liberal Political Mechanism, Berlin 2020), and Demokratie und Gewaltengliederung (Democracy and the Separation of Powers, Berlin 2025), his two recent publications have introduced him to a broad public: Öffentliche Kunstfreiheit (Public Freedom of Art, Berlin 2026, with Nils Weinberg) and Autoritäre Bedrohungen der Wissenschaftsfreiheit (Authoritarian Threats to Academic Freedom, Göttingen 2026, with Max Lenz and Nils Weinberg). He succeeds in office the historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, who will now belong to the circle of Permanent Fellows.
At the Berliner Empfang, Christoph Möllers will be inaugurated into office with a welcoming address by the legal scholar and former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Andreas Voßkuhle. Then he will present the new Fellows.
The 44 Fellows of the 2026/2027 academic year come primarily from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, but also from music, literature, and photography. They represent twenty-two nationalities and a large variety of disciplines and topics. Some of the Fellows have been selected through a search for especially promising early career scholars in the biological sciences or the humanities and social sciences. Younger Fellows from African universities come to the Wissenschaftskolleg via a collaboration with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. With support from the VolkswagenStiftung and the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard Foundation, the Yehudit and Yehuda Elkana Program supports Fellows who are endangered by limitations of research freedom in their home countries. And finally, the Wissenschaftskolleg supports the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study, founded in 2023, with an excellent VUIAS Fellow abroad in its Fellow cohort.
Among the Fellows’ research projects are such timely topics as “Tourism as a Commodity Frontier: A Global History” (Sven Beckert, Harvard), “Pandemic, Protest, and Political Stability in China” (Xi Chen, Chapel Hill),„Die Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit angesichts pluralisierter Gesellschaften – ausgehend von der Rolle des Bundesverfassungsgerichts im Wiedervereinigungsprozess (“Constitutional jurisdiction in the face of pluralized societies – in the example of the role of the Federal Constitutional Court in the reunification process”, Aurore Gaillet, Toulouse), “Fictitious Commodities Revisited: Enquiries into the Great Transformations of Market-Socialist Asia (Minh Nguyen, Bielefeld). But the Wissenschaftskolleg is also hosting basic research projects: “The Politics of Secrecy and Revelation: Foundlings, Intergenerational Alliances, and the Invention of Identity in the Early Modern Colonial World” (José Cárdenas Bunsen, Nashville), “Essential: An Economics of What We Cannot Live Without (Isabella M. Weber, Amherst), “The Symbolic Politics of Blumenberg, Habermas, and Schmitt” (Tae-Yeoun Keum, Santa Barbara), and “GenoMov: Toward a Conceptual Framework Linking Avian Movement, Genomics, and Disease Ecology” (Julián Padró, CONICET–National University of Comahue).
The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin offers internationally recognized, but also promising younger researchers, an academic year with the opportunity to concentrate on a work project they themselves choose, free of obligations. For ten months each year, circa 45 Fellows form a “learning community” in which diverse disciplinary perspectives, languages, and research cultures lead to new constellations. The institution is characterized by a climate of freedom and curiosity, optimal working conditions, and the stimulation potential of an outstanding researcher community.
Extensive information on the Fellows and Permanent Fellows, their research projects, the Kolleg itself, and its events can be found at www.wiko-berlin.de.
Contact
Katharina Wiedemann, Press and Public Relations
030 / 89001-117
wiedemann(at)wiko-berlin.de
Berlin, October 2026