19.06.2009
Centenary of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
On 4 July a ceremony in Heidelberg will celebrate the first one hundred years of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The history of the Academy goes all the way back to its forerunner institution, the Electoral Palatine Academy of Sciences, which was constituted in 1763 with the encouragement of the famous French philosopher Voltaire. The Academy was awarded the status of State Academy of Baden-Württemberg in 1958. Alongside its traditional scholarly functions the Academy also increasingly dedicates resources through its WIN College to promoting young, up and coming scientists. Under the general heading of “The human lifecycle – biological, social, cultural aspects” the Academy currently supports the work of four young interdisciplinary teams, each of which is working on different facets of aging – such as changes in memory functions or the religious and poetic “construction of senescence”
Like the other seven state academies in Germany, the State Academy of Baden-Württemberg is also a learned society and non-university research establishment. The Academy undertakes research in the natural sciences and humanities making it a genuine “Academy of Sciences and Humanities”. Ordinary fellows of the Academy are elected from distinguished scholars resident in the State of Baden-Württemberg and are joined by corresponding fellows from all around the world. At the present time the Academy has 183 ordinary and 74 corresponding fellows. These scholars work in the intensely interdisciplinary research framework of the Academy’s 20 research projects on which over 200 employees are currently working. The Academy's key remit is long-term basic research. Topics include climatic fluctuations throughout the history of the Earth, worldwide migratory movements in earlier epochs, the documentation of the ancient cultural heritages of the Upper Indus and Northern China, the edition of works of great thinkers in various fields, the compilation of scientific dictionaries and extensive musical research.
The Heidelberg Academy offers young scholars a rare opportunity of taking on the organisation of interdisciplinary conferences, choosing the conference theme themselves and assuming full responsibility for scientific planning. Plans are currently afoot for five such conferences. The first will take place in September 2009 in Heidelberg on the subject “The left alternative milieu and new social movement of the 1970s”.
