The Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) is a centre for advanced studies at Heidelberg University dedicated to innovative and socially relevant research on the end(s) of world(s). Going beyond traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, we bring together outstanding international scholars and scientists to contribute to the centre’s collaborative research while working on their individual projects. It is our mission to make space for a diverse knowledge collective, enriching exchanges in the humanities with insights from relevant perspectives from the social, life, and natural sciences and integrating non-academic forms of knowledge production in the arts and beyond. 

Biopolitics

In the 2025-2026 academic year, we zoom in on the role of biopolitics in the construction, classification, and contention of specific spatialities, temporalities, and affects, constitutive of apocalyptic experiences. We seek proposals that apply the concept of apocalypse to the paradoxical relationship between ambitions to create, foster, augment, and optimize life and various forms of exclusion, erasure, annihilation, and death. Building on common conceptions of biopolitics in political theory, international relations, cultural studies, critical sociology and the humanities more broadly we welcome projects on disciplining individual and collective bodies through regimes of regulatory power. We further welcome approaches that bring these discussions into novel and productive exchanges with inter- and transdisciplinary efforts in the natural, social, and life sciences, exploring notions of bios, politics, and ultimately (post-)apocalypse. The biopolitics of apocalypse may function as an intellectual catalyst for creative engagements within and between diverse communities of knowledge. This includes lived experiences of activists, artists, writers, filmmakers, etc., who seek to untangle the problem of living and dying at the end of world. 

Potential projects may address:

• survival, survivance, un/livability, posthuman life, alterlife, afterlife, traumatic life, wasted life, algorithmic life, etc.
• the historical, contemporary, and speculative unfoldings of a biopolitics of feeling, space, and time in the context of the apocalyptic conditions invoked by specific forms of gendered, classed, and racialised instances of colonialism, capitalism, Anthropocene modernity, nuclear threat, climate emergency, militarism, etc.
• implications of apocalyptic biopolitics for broader conceptualisations of knowledge, scholarship, and method
• theoretical or methodological reflections on the overall conceptual frame of CAPAS

Read more about eligibility and the application process regarding CAPAS Fellowships 2025-26.