Scholar Helga Nowotny Awarded Inaugural Yehuda Elkana Fellowship by the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network 

The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network is pleased to announce that the recipient of its inaugural Yehuda Elkana fellowship is Helga Nowotny.

The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network is a project of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), initiated and coordinated by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.

The Yehuda Elkana Fellowship is given in cooperation with the Institute for Human Sciences Vienna (IWM), Central European University and other OSUN partners from around the world. The fellowship is awarded annually to a scholar or public thinker of international importance who exhibits a wide-ranging and exuberant intellectual curiosity touching the humanities, social sciences, and science. In the spirit of Yehuda Elkana, the Fellow should also possess a generosity of spirit as a teacher and mentor. The Fellow will be in residence for one month in Vienna at the Institüt für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and also affiliated with the Central European University. As part of the fellowship, the Yehuda Elkana Fellow will give two public lectures. They will also participate in a week-long manuscript workshop in June 2021 with faculty and students from OSUN institutions; in this workshop, faculty selected from OSUN institutions will read and prepare presentations on a book manuscript or series of essays by the Yehuda Elkana Fellow. This workshop will be an opportunity for OSUN scholars to interact intensively with each other and with a major scholar in the humanities. It will be open to CEU and IWM faculty and students.

The Yehuda Elkana Fellowship comes with a prize of $15,000 plus living and travel expenses.

Helga Nowotny is one of the most prominent scholars in science studies worldwide, an area that counted Yehuda Elkana as one of its pioneers and promoters. For several decades she has been one of the most influential institution builders in European higher education and research.
At times, she partnered with Yehuda Elkana in daring new academic and institutional endeavors.

Throughout her long and distinguished academic career at institutions in the US, Europe and Asia, Helga Nowotny has embraced and helped establish an interdisciplinary and engaged approach to the study of science, combining perspectives from the humanities, social and natural sciences - in particular from law, sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy of science, mathematics and cognitive science - in order to be able to better situate scientific expertise, practice and impact in context. Her highly consequential research and publications focus on matters such as dealing with technological risks, coping with uncertainty, time and social theory, organization of science, gender relations in science and “the place of people in our knowledge” (the title of one of her studies). She has launched or helped establish influential new concepts or theories, such as “Mode 2” of scientific research.

More than once, Helga Nowotny has played a major role in setting up a new course for higher education and science policies in Europe - at the European, national or institutional level. For this, she has worked with European intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and
bodies, such as the European Science Foundation, governmental agencies in several countries of East and West as well as independent organizations and committees of scholars. She has taken part in, or directly led, the design and establishment of innovative new institutions, such as the European Research Council (the most influential organization in European research ever), Collegium Budapest (the first institute of advanced study in a former communist country) or Central European University (which Yehuda Elkana led for ten years as President).

Helga Nowotny is an engaged scholar and effective science entrepreneur. She has personally experienced the force of social constraints on science, on the production, dissemination and use of knowledge, including in a landmark case of gender discrimination that she was subjected to
in her early career. Helga Nowotny has made her mission not only to study science in context and contribute tirelessly to building and refining the conceptual and methodological apparatus for this study, but also to promote the advancement of science, scientists and science educators
through practical action, against the social, political, ideological or institutional odds of our times.

Post Date: January 26, 2021