Mission and Profile

Watch the film about SCAS here: SCAS: A Place for Scientific Curiosity

Mission
Chartered by the Government of Sweden as an institute for advanced study, the Collegium is a national
scientific institution and resource, aiming to provide optimal research conditions for curiosity-driven,
cutting-edge research. The Collegium offers exceptional and creative scholars a scholarly community
where they are free to pursue research of their own choosing in a context of interdisciplinary dialogue,
discussion, and cooperation. Since its foundation in 1985, the Collegium strives to protect and nurture
independent inquiry, collaborative and creative thinking, and to emphasize the importance of academic
freedom worldwide. Governmental support and support from major research foundations, such as Riks-
bankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) and the Swedish Research Council (VR), allow the invited Fellows to engage
in focused research and to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

The Collegium is open to applications from scholars across the range of the human and social sciences,
as well as from scholars engaged in cross-faculty topics with a natural science component. Advanced
senior scholars as well as early-career scholars are hosted as residential Fellows during one semester or
an entire academic year. All candidates are assessed on the basis of their individual achievements and the
quality and promise of their research proposal, including those who apply within the framework of a
group. Every year presents a novel mixture of Fellows from all over the world who either work on their
individual projects or who are part of a cluster of scholars with similar interests.

During 2024-25, 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 a consistent ambition to study the variety of
trajectories that characterize the development of human societies. The Collegium emphasizes the signi-
ficance of the social and human sciences for understanding the contemporary and historical condition
of humankind in its diverse global contexts. The academic openness is a cornerstone of the activities of
the Collegium, providing space for a wide array of academic subjects and topics. The General Fellowship
Programme, which is the largest programme and a constant since the foundation of the Collegium, offers
a maximum of intellectual freedom and space for novel ideas and encounters.

The open profile of the Collegium also allows for the emergence of thematic foci. The sustained interest
of the Fellows in processes of modernity, globalization and global governance has been further strengthened
by the Global Horizons Fellowship Programme. This initiative advances 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 also offers an arena for engaging with scholars across disciplinary boundaries,
but also with public intellectuals, and policy makers. Engagement in questions relating to the temporal
aspects of governance processes has been expanded by the hosting of the research programme Global
Foresight, focusing 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 overarching aim and profile of the Collegium
by nurturing research on cultural and social diversity, cultural heritage and creativity, societal structures
and public resistance, and varieties of cultural expressions in local and global perspective. The programme
attracts scholars concerned with 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 effort 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 shared history of the world’s popula-
tions over the past 10,000 years, a period marked by the advent of agrarian food production, population
growth and linguistic changes, as well as the emergence of early civilizations.

Additionally, the Collegium is a partner in an international endeavour 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 the ties between the Swedish research
community and Nordic colleagues.

The Collegium of today is an institution that offers scholars the opportunity to be driven by their own
intellectual curiosity; that facilitates the bridging of disciplinary and faculty boundaries; and that remains
small enough to build a scholarly community. By doing so, research at the Collegium may provide insight,
innovative knowledge, and intellectual breakthroughs that contribute to the advancement of science and
society at large.

Institutional Collaboration
The commitment to collaboration with other institutes for advanced study and with universities remains a
vital component of the Collegium’s activities, and the Collegium nurtures the establishment of novel con-
stellations of researchers and ideas. Especially important is the collaboration of 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 Ad-
vanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard Univer-
sity; Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study; and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

In 2004, the Collegium was a founding member of the network of now twenty-five European institutes for
advanced study (NetIAS). Originating from NetIAS are a number of collaborative engagements, among which
the CAT programme stands as an example of the Collegium’s striving to support transnational and cross-faculty
collaboration among younger, talented researchers. The Collegium also supports increased collaboration in the
Nordics, by being one of the founding members of the NordIAS network.

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,
a programme which brings together scholars from different fields, such as linguistics, archaeology, ancient
genomics, anthropology, and the history of religion.