Fellowships at both PhD Candidate and postdoctoral level (f/m/d)
National Maritime Museum (DSM), Bremerhaven
Global Connectivity in Maritime Perspective - International Fellowships DSM 2025
Do you also think that the global impact of our relationship with the sea has so far been little addressed? The German Maritime Museum, Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM) offers you the opportunity to come on board and contribute to the international impact of maritime awareness. The collection of the German Maritime Museum houses a wide range of technical artefacts, which represent unique and sometimes difficult paths and thus reflect the complex entanglement between the sea and its use and abuse/endangerment, its scientific exploration as well as its perceptions. This is reflected in the construction and object biography of technological devices, such as telescopes, compasses or tidal machines. The museum’s collection also includes a vast selection of historical objects that demonstrate the richness of maritime material culture, such as ship models, artefacts of daily life on board ships or clothing. Furthermore, the museum’s archive keeps documents and visual material related to most topics of Maritime History.
The DSM is offering international fellowships at both PhD Candidate and postdoctoral level for applicants who are engaging in inter- and transdisciplinary object-based research and are interested in becoming part of a new exhibition programme based around the cultural and political significance of the relationship between humans and the sea. The Fellowships are aimed at non-German scientists who are not already at German academic institutions on a long-term basis. International scholarship holders receive a scholarship, the amount of which depends on the applicant's level of education, the duration of the scholarship and the quality of the proposed project. The planned duration of the fellowship can range from three months to a maximum of nine months (depending on the planned project). Fellowships can start from March 2025.PhDs receive 2000,- EUR per month, PostDocs 3000,- EUR per month.
We expect successful applicants to stay in Bremerhaven, Bremen or the surrounding area for the duration of the scholarship. As part of the Bremen University Research Alliance (UBRA), candidates can also take advantage of the help of the Welcome Center of Bremen University, which supports foreign academics in the state of Bremen: https://www.bremen-research.de/en/welcome-center
The fellow will be part of the museum’s team, have access to the museum’s collections and will have the opportunity to organize workshops in cooperation with the museum. The fellow will be encouraged to engage actively in interdisciplinary forums and academic teaching and will be an active part of the museum’s outreach programme. We expect candidates to have very good written and spoken communication skills in English. Knowledge of German language would be helpful, especially for working with archive materials.
The scope of the fellowship is to select one or a group of artefacts or archival materials in order to assess their source value, investigate their provenance and examine their significance for the history of humankind’s relationship with seas and oceans. In addition, the researcher should contribute to developing innovative forms of science communication around technical artefacts both in the context of the future overall exhibition of the German Maritime Museum as well as during the project itself. Thus, the fellow will be asked to both contribute to the exhibition planning and the evaluation of the archival and material collection. We expect candidates to inform themselves in advance about the research and plans at the DSM.
Interested researchers are invited to send proposals that include:
Academic CV
Project Proposal of 800-1000 words in German or English language including a description of the research idea and planned outcomes, including preliminary work that might be relevant for the project
a work plan with indication of the preferred period of the year
a copy of a previous publication, this can be a journal article, a contribution to an anthology or a chapter of a monograph
until the 31st of January 2025 to:
Dr. Sven Bergmann (bergmann(at)dsm.museum), Internationalization Officer at the DSM
The applications are reviewed by a committee at the DSM. As the scholarships can be filled as early as spring 2025, we will get back to you as soon as possible. If you have any questions, please contact Sven Bergmann.
