Call for Applications: Doctoral Program and Data Management Coordinator
Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights”
The promise of human rights to protect people everywhere from abuses and injustices and to enable them to live in equal dignity remains unfulfilled for most of the world’s population despite the growth of human rights instruments, institutions, and organizations.
Furthermore, skepticism in academic discourses and the open rejection of human rights by many states and political actors are on the rise. The Cluster of Excellence Transforming Human Rights therefore seeks to revisit the potential of human rights as a universalistic framework for addressing fundamental changes that shape our times in political, economic, social, ecological, and technological contexts.
Shedding light on the potential and limitations of human rights
To achieve this goal, we will describe, analyze, and assess how five megatrends, namely autocratization, fragmented economic globalization, international migration, planetary environmental crises, and digitalization, are transforming human rights, and how in turn human rights can and should transform responses to the megatrends. We also seek to understand the ways in which these transformations challenge human rights theory, and invite us to rethink fundamental normative claims about human rights.
We will operationalize our research through three central dimensions of human rights norms: rights-holders and duty-bearers of human rights (Who?); content and scope of human rights obligations (What?); and modes of realization and accountability (How?). The Cluster’s approach rests on an understanding of human rights that draws on legal, social scientific, and philosophical perspectives.
Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research
We will therefore pursue multi- and interdisciplinary research as well as transdisciplinary approaches involving practitioners in order to innovate human rights scholarship. We will engage in empirical, conceptual, and normative analyses of human rights transformations.
The Cluster will be hosted by FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, the only university in Germany with an established institutional focus on human rights. Over the past fifteen years, FAU has made continuous strategic investments to advance this important field, including by creating new professorships. Based on this, the unique multidisciplinary group of scholars who make up this Cluster will elevate human rights research at FAU to the next level, create outstanding programs for early-career researchers and international fellows, and thus shape the university’s overall profile.
Located in Nuremberg, embedded in an international network
Together with four participating institutions in Germany, – the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, the German Institute for Human Rights, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology – as well as fifteen international partners, we will reimagine and strengthen human rights research at a critical time. To this end, the Cluster will establish an exceptionally inspiring, diverse, and inclusive research space for human rights in Nuremberg, a “City of Peace and Human Rights,” whose extensive human rights activities have been developed as a conscious reaction to the 20th-century atrocities that led to the construction of today’s international system for human rights protection.
Starting on 1 January 2026, the Cluster of Excellence is funded for seven years by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments.
Principle Investigators
Prof. Dr. Grażyna Baranowska
Institute of German, European and International Public Law
Chair of Migration Law and Human Rights
Prof. Dr. Markus Beckmann
School of Business, Economics and Society
Chair of Corporate Sustainability Management
Prof. Dr. Petra Bendel
Institute of Political Science
Professor of Political Science, Head of Research on Migration, Displacement and Integration
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Heiner Bielefeldt
Institute of Political Science
Senior Professor of Human Rights
Prof. Dr. Başak Çalı
Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights
Professor of International Law at University of Oxford
Prof. Dr. Laura Clérico
Honorary Professor of Constitutional Comparative Law and Protection of Human Rights
Prof. Dr. Thomas Demmelhuber
Institute of Political Science
Chair of Middle East Politics and Society
Prof. Dr. Simone Derix
Department of History
Chair of Modern and Contemporary History
Prof. Dr. Anuscheh Farahat
Professor of Public Law in the European Context at University of Vienna
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Felix Freiling
Department of Computer Science
Chair of Computer Science 1 (IT Security Infrastructures)
Prof. Dr. Georg Glasze
Department of Geography
Chair of Geography (Cultural Geography & Political Geography)
Prof. Dr. Thoko Kaime
Chair of African Legal Studies at the University of Bayreuth
Prof. Dr. Katrin Kinzelbach
Institute of Political Science
Chair of Human Rights Politics
Prof. Dr. Markus Krajewski
Institute for German, European, and International Public Law
Chair of Public Law and International Law
Prof. Dr. Erasmus Mayr
Institute of Philosophy
Chair of Practical Philosophy
Prof. Dr. Dominik Müller
Institute of Sociology
Chair of Cultural and Social Anthropology
Prof. Dr. Vincent C. Müller
Institute for Science in Society
Chair of Theory and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Prof. Dr. Paulina Pesch
Institute of Law and Technology
Junior Professorship of Civil Law, Law of Digitalization, Data Protection Law and Artificial Intelligence Law
Prof. Dr. Eva Pils
Institute for German, European, and International Public Law
Chair of Human Rights Law
Prof. Dr. Beate Rudolf
Director of the German Institute for Human Rights
Prof. Dr. Christoph Safferling, LL.M.
Institute for Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, Criminology
Chair of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, International Criminal Law and International Law
Prof. Dr. Almut Schilling-Vacaflor
School of Business, Economics and Society
Chair for International Business, Society and Sustainability
Prof. Dr. Sören Torrau
Professorship of Political Science and its Didactics at Karlsruhe University of Education
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patricia Wiater
Institute for German, European, and International Public Law
Chair of Public Law, International Law and Human Rights
Associate Principle Investigators
Prof. Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets
Representative of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI)
Director of the Department of Law & Ethnology
Prof. Dr. Andreas Frewer
Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine
Professorship of Ethics in Medicine
Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper
Institute of Geography
Chair of Geography (Cultural Geography and Social/Environmental Research)
Dr. Annelen Micus
Representative of the European Center for European and Constitutional Rights (ECCHR)
Co-Director of the Institute for Legal Intervention
PD Dr. Daniel Stahl
Department of History
Senior Researcher at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History
Prof. Dr. Blake Walker
Institute of Geography
Professorship of Geography (Digital Geography/Cultural Geography)
Header image: FAU/Giulia Iannicelli.