An overview of the Collegium's mission, scholarly profile & institutional collaboration

Mission

Chartered by the Government of Sweden as an institute for advanced study, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) is a national scientific institution and resource that aims to provide optimal conditions for curiosity-driven, cutting-edge research. The Collegium provides a scholarly community where outstanding and creative scholars are free to pursue research of their own choosing in a context of interdisciplinary dialogue, discussion, and collaboration. Since its founding in 1985, the Collegium has strived to protect and foster independent inquiry, collaborative and creative thinking, and to emphasize the importance of academic freedom worldwide. Government support and funding from major research foundations, such as Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) and the Swedish Research Council (VR), enable the invited Fellows to pursue focused research and to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

The Collegium is open to applications from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as scholars engaged in cross-faculty topics with a natural science component. Advanced senior scholars and early-career scholars alike are hosted as Residential Fellows for a semester or a full academic year. All candidates, including those applying as part of a group, are assessed on the basis of their individual achievements and the quality and promise of their research proposals. Each year brings a new mix of Fellows from around the world, either working on their own individual projects or as part of a cluster of scholars with similar interests.

During the 2024–25 academic year, the Fellows represent some 24 universities/organizations in eleven countries, and a range of research topics.

Scholarly Profile

The academic profile of the Collegium has grown out of its consistent ambition to study the variety of trajectories that characterize the development of human societies. The Collegium emphasizes the importance of the social and human sciences in understanding the contemporary and historical condition of humankind in its diverse global contexts. Academic openness is a cornerstone of the Collegium’s activities, providing space for a wide array of research subjects and topics. The General Fellowship Programme, the Collegium’s largest programme and a constant since its foundation, offers a maximum of intellectual freedom and space for new ideas and encounters.

The Collegium’s open profile also allows for the emergence of thematic foci. The Fellows’ sustained interest in processes of modernity, globalization and global governance has been further strengthened by the Global Horizons Fellowship Programme. This initiative promotes multidisciplinary and cutting-edge research on global governance issues, focusing on large-scale challenges. The programme is future-oriented in its ambition to contribute to the advancement of knowledge on contemporary forms of governance and their future implications. It offers an arena for engaging with scholars across disciplinary boundaries, as well as with public intellectuals and policy makers. The engagement with questions related to the temporal aspects of governance processes has been expanded through the hosting of the Global Foresight research programme, which focuses on how organizations attempt to anticipate the future, how scenario models are produced, and what they tell us about proposed solutions for tackling global challenges.

The Barbro Klein Fellowship Programme contributes to the overall aim and profile of the Collegium by promoting research on cultural and social diversity, cultural heritage and creativity, societal structures and public resistance, and varieties of cultural expressions from a local and global perspective. The programme attracts scholars interested in how we, as human beings, engage with and respond creatively to a volatile and turbulent world and what mindsets, worldviews, and social practices that set the world in motion.

The Human Past Fellowship Programme, a joint initiative with the Center for the Human Past, is designed to foster a collaborative environment across a wide range of disciplines such as archaeology, population genetics and historical linguistics. These fields collectively explore the common history of the world’s populations over the past 10,000 years, a period marked by the advent of agrarian food production, population growth and linguistic change, as well as the emergence of early civilizations.

The Collegium is also a partner in an international initiative to support researchers in Ukraine through the Virtual Ukrainian Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) Fellowship Programme. The newly launched Nordic Fellowship Programme aims at strengthening ties between the Swedish research community and Nordic colleagues.

Today, SCAS is an institution that offers scholars the opportunity to be driven by their own intellectual curiosity, facilitates the bridging of disciplinary and faculty boundaries, and remains small enough to build a sense of scholarly community. In this way, the research at the Collegium can provide insights, innovative knowledge, and intellectual breakthroughs that contribute to the advancement of science and society as a whole.

Institutional Collaboration

The Collegium’s commitment to collaboration with other institutes for advanced study and universities remains a vital component of its activities, and the Collegium supports the establishment of novel constellations of researchers and ideas. Of particular importance in this regard is the collaboration between ten leading institutes for advanced study within the SIAS group (Some Institutes for Advanced Study), of which the Collegium was a founding member in 1991: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Institut d’études avancées de Nantes; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem; National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC; Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study; and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

In 2004, the Collegium was a founding member of a network now comprising 25 European institutes for advanced study (NetIAS). A number of collaborative undertakings have emerged from NetIAS, among which the CAT programme is an example of the Collegium’s efforts to promote transnational and cross-faculty collaboration among young and talented researchers. As one of the founding members of the NordIAS network, the Collegium also supports increased collaboration in the Nordic countries.

The Collegium also engages in institutional collaboration around specific research programmes. One example is the ongoing cooperation with the RJ-funded research programme LAMP (Languages and Myths of Prehistory), which brings together scholars from fields such as linguistics, archaeology, ancient genomics, anthropology, and the history of religion.