Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to apply for a scholarship for the 2024 cohort.

The call for applications for a scholarship for the 2025 cohort will be published in fall 2024.

Association: Candidates who have individual institutional funding (from January 2025 at the latest) are invited to submit an application for association to our programme. Please send you application to the following email-address: application@bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de. For the 2024 cohort, which will start in October 2024, applications can be submitted until September 2024.

General Information

Currently, our supervisors can offer supervision for doctoral degrees in the following disciplines:

• Arabic Studies
• Asian and African Studies
• Central Asian Studies
• History
• Human Geography
• Islamic Studies
• Iranian Studies
• Political Science
• Semitic Studies
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• South and Southeast Asian Studies
• South East European History 

Doctoral fellows at BGSMCS are concurrently enrolled in a university department, either at Freie Universität Berlin or at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, depending on the discipline and your first supervisor’s affiliation. This means that the supervisors can only accept doctoral researchers pursuing a degree in the discipline that they are currently working in. E.g., a professor in Islamic Studies can usually not supervise a doctoral fellow pursing a degree in political science etc.

Please understand that we cannot determine your eligibility for admission for a specific discipline before you have submitted your application package. It is important that the choice of discipline (which is connected to your preferred supervisor) should relate to your previous academic achievements AND to your planned doctoral research. The consideration of the following three points can help you to better assess your eligibility for a specific discipline:

• Check if you have learned the relevant methodological and theoretical skills to pursue a doctoral degree in the discipline that you choose.
• Consider the research that our supervisors are engaged in to determine whether your planned doctoral research falls within their area of interest and expertise.
• Consider the department websites for information about the courses our supervisors teach on the B.A. and M.A. level.

For further questions related to application and admission, please also consider our FAQ.

General information about pursuing a PhD can be found here (Freie Universität Berlin) and here (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin). Please read through this information carefully before asking further questions. Thank you!

Should questions remain unanswered, please contact us through application@bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de .