Horkheimer Fellowship
To honor the legacy of Max Horkheimer – philosopher, sociologist and long-term director of the Institute for Social Research – as one of the key founders of Critical Theory, the IfS has been awarding the Horkheimer Fellowship to international postdoctoral scholars since 2023. The Fellowship’s aim is to support excellent scholars from all social science, humanities and cultural studies disciplines to pursue a research project at the Institute during a three-month stay.
The call for applications is issued annually.
Call for Applications
Horkheimer Fellowship 2026
Fascization and Antifascism
Position: Postdoctoral fellowship
Location: Institute for Social Research (IfS) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Start date: September 2026, duration of three months
Application deadline: April 20, 2026, 5:00 PM, CET
To honor the legacy of Max Horkheimer, philosopher, sociologist and long-term director of the Institute for Social Research, as one of the key founders of Critical Theory, the IfS is announcing the 2026 Horkheimer Fellowship. The Fellowship’s aim is to support critical scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to pursue a clearly defined research project. This year’s focus is on fascization and antifascism. The growing global influence of authoritarian movements and regressive political projects has prompted a scholarly debate about whether these developments should be understood as the beginning of a new wave of fascization. The aim of the Horkheimer Fellowship 2026 is to advance the debate on how analyses of fascism—including the seminal studies of early Critical Theory—can contribute to our understanding of contemporary societal constellations. We are particularly interested in how contemporary forms of fascization can be countered, and we welcome both theoretical and empirical approaches. In this way, greater visibility for social practices of resistance that are already opposing the authoritarian transformation of social relations around the globe today could be achieved. At the same time, however, it is important to examine the conditions, limits, and contradictions of antifascist practice.
The Fellowship is primarily addressed to international postdoctoral scholars who will be invited to spend a three-month research visit at the Institute for Social Research. Successful applicants can expect a lively and collegial working environment at the IfS, integration into the Institute’s ongoing work as well as institutional support in organizing the research stay (including possible presentations, colloquia, or workshops). An internationally visible publication following the funding period should provide information on the project pursued during the research visit.
Remuneration
Successful applicants will receive a grant of €4,000 per month for their three-month stay at the IfS.
Location
The Institute for Social Research is a renown academic institution located in Frankfurt am Main. The IfS’s organizational and technical infrastructure, including a fully equipped workplace as well as project-related support staff, will be made available to the Fellow for the duration of the Fellowship. The Fellow is expected to be physically present at the Institute for the three months of the Fellowship.
Application and selection procedure
The Fellowship for the period of three months, beginning preferably in September/October 2026, will be awarded on the basis of a written application to the advertised Fellowship program. A committee composed of IfS members will select the successful applicant on the basis of the academic quality of their application and the applicant’s profile, in accordance with the objective of promoting diversity in academia and research.
Applications can only be submitted in English using the application form provided on the IfS website. The selection procedure will be completed in May 2026. Applications and questions regarding the Fellowship should be addressed to: horkheimer-fellowship@ifs-frankfurt.de
Previous Fellows
2025
Elisa Greco
Green Grabs in Africa: a Class-Theoretical Perspective
This research foregrounds the importance of reinserting class into the analytical framework on green grabs – a term referring to the increase of land enclosure in the Global South which has been driven by environmental policies. While urgent throughout the Global South, this issue is often neglected in North-based environmental debates. The most recent literature highlights activists’ claims that green grabs are a product of ecological imperialism and neocolonialism, which is a primary contradiction in global environmental policies. Within this debate, the proposal is that to overcome this contradiction and propose a radical alternative the category of class must be put centre-stage. This theoretical development – bridging critical agrarian studies and environmental social sciences - proposes class as a theoretical perspective, reinterpreting Marx’s class analysis towards a relational understanding that foregrounds class as the political potential of unity of the majority. Critically engaging with identity politics and degrowth thinking, Issa Shivji’s concept of the working people is put to the test of global realities of uneven and combined development, by looking at increasing social inequality and the related class politics that are apparent through the North-South divide. The objective of this research stay at the IfS is to publish an article that develops class as an analytical and political tool that bridges the neocolonial divide, responding to the division and fragmentation of current environmental and agrarian movements.
2024
Marcel Stoetzler
The Concept of Racialization and the Dichotomy of Antisemitism and Racism
The project concerns the relationship of the concepts of »racism« and »antisemitism«. Antisemitism can be argued to be »a form of racism« (as had been common in most of the classic studies of racism) without thereby subsuming (and trivializing) it as »a particular« under racism as »the universal« as long as »race« is understood in an anti-essentialist (or anti-realist) manner as the societal process of »racialization« (as anti-racist scholars first proposed in the 1980s). Bringing the critique of antisemitism back into the study and critique of racism requires recuperating a broader understanding of racism as a social form that neither exclusively focuses on colour codes and the colonial context of their emergence nor is blind to its populist, seemingly anti-hegemonic or »anti-elite« forms.
2023
Bruna della Torre
The New Organization. Digital Culture Industry, Social Networks, and Right-Wing Propaganda in Brazil
The project reframes Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry and the Frankfurt School’s studies of propaganda (as well as its contemporary successors) to analyze how the digital apparatus of social media impacts democracies in the Global South, with a particular focus on the recent Brazilian experiment. The objective is to investigate the relationship between the rise of right-wing extremism and the »Digital Culture Industry«. Within this scope, the idea proposed in this project is to expand the analysis of this propaganda concerning specific themes refined by theoretical and virtual ethnographic research so far. This implicates investigating the agitation that circulates mainly on social networks related to the defense of freedom (of speech and to carry weapons), anti-feminism and the so-called »Gender Ideology«, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the mobilization of apocalypticism. The goal of this research stay at the IfS is to write a book project inspired by the studies carried out in the 1940s by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman entitled Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1948), in which the techniques of anti-democratic propaganda and its contents are thoroughly analyzed.
Funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.