Frequently Asked Questions

 

Q: What is the amount of the Fellowship award?

A: The annual amount of the award depends on the size of the Foundation’s capital endowment, and on the earnings of that endowment. We are currently mounting a capital campaign to increase the size of the endowment. Its annual earnings vary from year to year. Our goal is a capital endowment whose annual earnings comfortably fund a full year’s research sabbatical for the Fellow. The Fellow will be informed of the amount of the award when notified of his or her selection.

Q: Is the Fellowship residential, or can the Fellow maintain residency at his or her home institution?

A: The Fellow can maintain residency at his or her home institution if necessary. However, once the APRA Foundation Berlin moves into its permanent quarters, it will offer a rent-free, fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in Berlin-Mitte, should the Fellow wish to spend a year in Berlin in order to have direct access to the Archive and to Berlin’s rich array of universities, research institutes, libraries, museums, galleries, film, theatre, concerts, and other cultural events. In that case the residency period begins on 1 September and runs through 15 August of the following year.

Q: Can the Fellowship be granted more than once to the same applicant?

A: In principle, yes. However, the APRA Foundation Berlin aims to find and support as many qualified applicants as possible over time.

Q: Why is the research theme limited to the conception, constitution and structure of the self?

A: For two reasons. First, this theme stands at the center of research in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences that attempts to understand what a human subject is and how its enormous, multi-faceted creative potential can be developed. Second, it encourages the Fellow to self-reflectively include in the research project the data of his or her first-personal experience as a human subject – i.e. as a self – whose own multi-faceted creative potential already has been developed and realized in more than one direction.

Q: Why is the award limited to multi-disciplinary professionals who contribute in divergent fields of specialization?

A: Because these individuals bear a unique relationship to the topic of the conception, constitution and structure of the self. Their multi-disciplinarity gives them valuable resources and concrete, practice-based insights to share about how various forms of social organization and patterns of behavior either contribute to or hinder cultivation of our multi-faceted creative potential as human beings. Yet their multi-disciplinarity may also lead each field of specialization to overlook, obscure or discount these resources and insights. The APRA Foundation Berlin Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship award aims to reward and encourage them.

Q: What is the difference between an interdisciplinary professional and a multi-disciplinary professional?

A: The difference is in the nature of the research product. An interdisciplinary professional produces a hybrid work that draws upon the research methods and/or content of more than one specialized field. A multi-disciplinary professional produces a specialized work that observes the given research methods and contents of its particular field, and does so in more than one such specialized field. A research product can be both interdisciplinary and also multi-disciplinary, if it is specialized rather than hybrid, such that it observes simultaneously the given research methods and content of each of the more than one such specialized fields it draws upon.

Q: Did Adrian ever experience “having a creative limb chopped off”?

A: Yes. During adolescence, she gave up playing and composing on the piano. During college, she gave up the ambitions to major in history and in physics.