EUCOR funding for new project on human remains approved

Good news for the new research project “Human Remains in University Collections - Comparison and Entanglements” - a first grant in the form of seed money from the “Research, Innovation and Transfer” funding stream has been approved as part of the EUCOR Campus start-up funding program.

Universities at the Upper Rhine have been involved in the collection of Human Remains since the 19th century. While origins, scope and historical trajectories vary, they all face similar challenges in reassessing and refiguring these ethically and otherwise sensitive collections. Collections in Basel, Freiburg and Strasbourg reflect global (and thus also colonial) trajectories of origins and knowledge production. Building on ample prior work and focusing both oncomparison and entanglement of collections between primarily these three, but also other sites, the project will focus:

1. on the production of an edited volume representing multiple disciplinary approaches and diverse perspectives – with one face-to-face and one virtual authors’ workshop (to be held in Freiburg) to prepare the manuscript
2. a second workshop in Strasbourg to open discussion with students and researchers and garner feedback on preliminary findings, and
3. the drafting of a bigger grant application to be prepared in Basel and submitted to a relevant funding body by the fourth quarter of 2026.

The consortium consists of Prof. Dr. Andreas Mehler from the University of Freiburg as well as Prof. Dr. Marie Muschalek from the Department of History at the University of Basel and Dr. Deborah Dubald from the Department of History of Science and Health at the University of Strasbourg. Associated partner institutions are the Arnold Bergsträsser Institute in Freiburg, the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel and the Jardin des Sciences at the University of Strasbourg.