About SCAS

Founded in 1985 the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) was the first institute of its kind in Northern Europe. It is a national scientific institution, chartered by the Government of Sweden as an institute for advanced study mainly in the social and human sciences.

In 1991 SCAS was a founding member of SIAS (”Some Institutes for Advanced Study”), a group of nine leading European and American institutes for advanced study, among them IAS Princeton and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

A core component of an institute for advanced study is a highly selective programme for visiting fellows. Scholars can apply to become Fellows-in-residence and after an extensive review process thirty senior as well as early career scholars are invited to spend one academic semester or one year at SCAS. Fellows are entirely free to focus on their own research whether they choose to work individually or form part of a thematic group. As a scholarly community the Collegium provides an environment that is conducive to a lively intellectual dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

The Collegium is located in Linneanum, a historic building in the Botanic Garden in Uppsala, near the Carolina Rediviva Library and other scientific facilities at Uppsala University.

SCHOLARLY FOCI
While the general aim is to be broadly representative of high-quality research in the social and human sciences, the Collegium maintains a long-term commitment in three key areas of scholarship. These are fields where its contributions are potentially crucial nationally and where the Collegium seeks to exert a contribution internationally.

Firstly, there is a consistent effort to re-establish a close link between the social and the historical sciences. A central component of this effort is a programme concentrating on periods of deep-seated historical transformations. The emerging paradigm of multiple modernities is one result and so is the reformulation of the hypothesis of the Axial Age.

Secondly, and partly as a consequence of the first effort, there is a commitment to fields of research that are sometimes labelled “small subjects”, but which are crucial to an understanding of the world in its cultural, historical and linguistic varieties. These include the study of the languages and histories of East and Central Asia.

Thirdly, the Collegium promotes closer contacts between the economic sciences and the other social and human sciences, in particular through the promotion of collaboration between economists, philosophers and analytical and experimental sociologists and psychologists.

Address: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Linneanum, Thunbergsvägen 2,
S-752 38 Uppsala, SWEDEN