Apply early for the 2027 NIAS Open Call

Researchers whose project falls broadly within the humanities and/or social sciences can apply for a fellowship in the 2028–2029 academic year. The 2027 NIAS Call for Proposals opens on 15 January and closes on 15 March 2027.

A fellowship at NIAS is not time away from your work so much as a different route into it. For five or ten months, fellows step out of their usual context and join a group of scholars working across entirely different disciplines. A philosopher, a journalist and a biologist reading the same chapter will each catch something the others miss, and that friction tends to surface the question you stopped noticing because everyone around you had long since stopped asking it. Working harder on a problem can take you a long way. Sometimes, though, what moves it forward is a change in who is in the room.

NIAS assesses a maximum of 216 eligible applications in each Open Call. To bring together equal numbers of fellows from the Netherlands, the Global North and the Global South, applications are divided into three categories of no more than 72 each. The first is for applicants affiliated with or based in the Netherlands. The second is for applicants affiliated with or based in another EU country or in Andorra, Australia, Canada, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States or Vatican City. The third is for applicants affiliated with or based anywhere else.

When a category is full, we will announce this on our selection procedure page and no further applications in that category will be accepted, even if the deadline has not yet passed. If a category does not reach its limit, the remaining places are divided equally between the other two. The cap does not apply to applications for Theme Group Fellowships.

Interest in a NIAS fellowship has grown steeply in recent years, and we welcome it. But the number of proposals we receive has outgrown what our selection team can assess with the attention each one deserves. Limiting the number of applications allows us to give every eligible proposal a careful and fair reading.

Dividing the places into three equal categories serves a second purpose. What fellows gain at NIAS depends on the mix of people around them, and a community drawn in equal measure from the Netherlands, the Global North and the Global South brings perspectives together that rarely meet elsewhere.

Details are available in the NIAS Individual Fellowship Application Guide. Please note that the regulations for the January 2027 call have not yet been updated; they will be published in mid-November.