Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School has been supported through the Excellence Initiative of the Federal and State governments since 2008. This support made it possible to try out and establish excellent structures for the education of junior scholars. The average duration of the dissertation is around 3.7 years, and our alumni generally succeed rather quickly in transitioning into a funded postdoc phase or in finding a career outside of academia. The doctoral candidates are mobile and international. They have learned to situate their own project within an interdisciplinary context and benefit from the intellectually stimulating and diverse environment at the Graduate School. 

The Graduate School’s performance was rewarded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin in 2017. The FSGS received the Einstein Award for Doctoral Programmes Berlin. In 2022, the FSGS won said award for the second time. An annual € 100,000 of prize money will be used to promote scholarship holders from the Global South in the upcoming years.

The Graduate School supports junior scholars in applying for scholarships and research funding and in the realization of their projects (work spaces, administration). International scholars visit the school through DAAD grants (Kaitlin Staudt, Carol Bartges, Chenxin Jiang) or the AvH (Izabel Rakar) and enhance discussion with their projects. Former scholars return with external funding (Johannes Görbert, Anne Enderwitz). FSGS doctoral candidates raise additional funding for visits abroad (Stanford, Princeton, Moscow).

Elena Giannoulis, Japanologist and junior professor at FSGS received an ERC-Grant [German]. Arabist Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Transregionale Studien fellow and FSGS associate achieved the same. Arata Takeda applied for a research project at the DFG and is directing the project at the Graduate School. 

The Graduate School has established vibrant partnerships with renowned international universities where doctoral candidates can spend their semester abroad. Conversely, each semester, four doctoral candidates from our partner universities enrich the Graduate School through their active participation and their own projects. They are funded by their home university.

The Graduate School motivates and supports its faculty in applying for projects, specifically through the Visiting Fellowship format of the Einstein Foundation Berlin, in order to expand the Graduate School’s international profile. So far, the Graduate School has benefitted from the input of the following Visiting Fellows: Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton), Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (University of Tokyo), Susan Merrill Squier (Penn State University), and Michel Chaouli (Indiana University). From 2023 to 2025, a project group led by Karen Leeder (Oxford University) will conduct research at FSGS. Funding is provided through a cooperation between the Einstein Foundation and the Berlin University Alliance.

The Graduate School connects Berlin research projects of literary scholars and their dissertations. It integrates young literary scholars into its own network: they present their projects at the lunch forum, participate in the yearly research colloquia and, to some extent, have their work spaces at the Graduate School. The following projects are connected to the Graduate School: Zukunftsphilologie, Travelling Traditions, Interweaving Performance Cultures.