Research projects in the Academies' Program

The joint research program of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities serves to develop, preserve, and research our cultural heritage.

The Academies’ Program is Germany’s largest research program in the humanities and social sciences and is unique on an international scale. Through their long-term basic research, the academies make an indispensable contribution to documenting our cultural memory and to shaping both national and transnational cultural identities. Since 1979/80, the Academies’ Program has been jointly funded by the federal and state governments. It is coordinated by the Union of German Academies. Within the Academies Program, approximately 900 staff members work on around 130 projects across more than 190 research centers. Through the editions, dictionaries, and text corpora they produce, the academies create central repositories of knowledge for the future that are available to the academic community and the public—increasingly in digital form as well.

Current / Completed Current
Completed

dictionary

Global Basic Lexicon (GloBasLex)


The “Global Basic Lexicon” (GloBasLex) project collects and documents basic vocabularies of the world’s languages based on published dictionaries. The goal is to build a freely accessible database of parallel word lists for 1,000 basic concepts, covering nearly all sufficiently documented languages worldwide. With around 1,500 languages from every continent, this is becoming one of the most comprehensive resources of its kind.   

Edition

Theologenbriefwechsel im Südwesten des Reichs in der Frühen Neuzeit (1550-1620)


The research center collects, catalogs, and edits letters written by leading theologians and church leaders during the period between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years' War.

Edition

Sources on the religious and legal history of pre-modern Nepal


The aim is to digitally provide and edit an extensive corpus of documents and texts on the religious and legal history of pre-modern Nepal.

comment

Malala's comment


The project focuses on the development of a comprehensive philological and historical commentary on the chronicle, which can be analyzed, contextualized, and better understood through specific individual studies.

Edition

Karl Jaspers Complete Edition (KJG)


In order to reveal and appreciate the broad context of Jaspers' thinking, as it emerges from his published works, his estate, and his numerous correspondences, a complete edition of his works is being compiled, which will make all relevant texts accessible in their context and available as a systematically interconnected whole.

cultural studies

Commentary on fragments of Greek comedy (KomFrag)


The aim of the commentaries is, on the one hand, to elucidate the texts, which are generally difficult to understand, from all possible perspectives and, on the other hand, where possible, to attempt a reconstruction of the plays and to classify the authors in terms of literary history.

cultural studies

ROCEEH


The aim of the research center is to reconstruct the spatio-temporal migratory movements of hominids between 3 million and 20,000 years ago.

Edition

Buddhist stone inscriptions in China


The task of the research center, which was established in 2005, is to compile a complete and systematic documentation of these stone inscriptions, some of which have only been rediscovered in recent years.

The projects in the Academies' Program are coordinated by the Academies' Union. The Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities is an association of eight German science academies in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Mainz, and Munich.

Union of Academies of the Russian Federation