HERA’s most significant activity to date has been the funding of European humanities research. Its mission has been to fund humanities-led projects that require up to €1 million in budget over three years. We also fund projects which investigate issues that require a transnational perspective in order to be adequately addressed.
Funding Humanities Research
HERA’s funding has been used to support large-scale joint research programmes and associated activities such as matchmaking exercises for research applicants and knowledge exchange activities for projects. Over the course of its first three funding calls, HERA together with the European Commission pooled €56 million to fund 49 transnational projects. Through these projects 231 scholars, 206 postdoctoral researchers and 88 PhD students were funded, and worked together with 173 partners from civil society and cultural institutions.
HERA’s funding calls have been characterised by the following
- humanities-focused research questions and methodologies
- multinational teams
- interdisciplinary approaches
- strong knowledge exchange and impact dimensions
- inclusivity (e.g. mixing large and small countries, and EU-15 and EU-13 countries) to assist with research capacity-building across Europe
- excellence as the most fundamental criterion for the evaluation of HERA applications.
Who we fund
HERA funds humanities researchers across all disciplines from 25 participating countries
| Austria | Belgium | Czech Republic | Croatia |
| Denmark | Estonia | Finland | France |
| Germany | Iceland | Ireland | Italy |
| Latvia | Lithuania | Luxembourg | Netherlands |
| Norway | Poland | Portugal | Slovakia |
| Slovenia | Spain | Sweden | Switzerland |
| United Kingdom |