The Foundation supports 17 research projects about the Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe
2025-10-03
The Board of the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies has at its meeting on 2 October 2025 made the decisions on which research projects will receive funding in this year’s calls. The assessment work in the Foundation’s various assessment panels has resulted in recommendations to the Foundation’s Board, which has now decided to grant a total of SEK 98,9 million to 17 research projects.
Two and three-year projects
Funding support for a project is available for an individual researcher or a small group of researchers. The project period is two or three years and the amount of grant is a maximum of SEK 2 million a year. The Foundation approved 13 project applications in this year’s application round. The approval rate for the call was 13%.
| Ref. no. | Project title | Project manager | Amount granted |
| 25-PR2-0005 | Leave-Based Workplace Discrimination: Differential Work Evaluations of Women and Men for Parental Leave of Equal Duration | Helen Eriksson | SEK 5,599,000 |
| 25-PR2-0006 | National Membership in a New Security Landscape: Ambivalently Securitized Migrants in the Baltic Sea Region | Karin Borevi | SEK 5,947,000 |
| 25-PR2-0011 | Tracing Queer Political Histories in Croatia, Romania and Sweden through Intergenerational Narratives: Explorations of LGBTQ+ Life Stories | Anna Siverskog | SEK 4,965,000 |
| 25-PR2-0012 | Infrastructures of care and justice. Sex workers’ mobilizations in the Central and Eastern Europe | Anna Ratecka | SEK 2,998,000 |
| 25-PR2-0021 | Cataclysm: Environmental Histories of the Holocaust | Emily Rebecca Gioielli | SEK 4,289,000 |
| 25-PR2-0025 | Information management in Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion 2022 | Göran Bolin | SEK 5,997,000 |
| 25-PR2-0026 | Algorithmic Forensics: Algorithmic Welfare Fraud Detection in the Baltic Sea Region | Maris Männiste | SEK 5,790,000 |
| 25-PR2-0031 | Exile activism in the Baltic Sea Region: Analysing the activism of Eastern European political diaspora groups in democratic receiving countries | Magnus Wennerhag | SEK 5,998,000 |
| 25-PR2-0032 | The Tsar’s Men in the Tropics: The Russian Empire and International Colonialism in Equatorial Africa, 1895–1910 | Oleksandr Polianichev | SEK 4,791,000 |
| 25-PR2-0033 | Democracy when form meets content: Formal and informal political structures in Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine. | Jenny Eva Åberg | SEK 4,680,000 |
| 25-PR2-0036 | Seeds of Dissent: the political economy of Farmers’ Resistance in the Baltic Region. The cases of Poland and Sweden | Matilda Baraibar | SEK 5,760,000 |
| 25-PR2-0037 | Strange Futures: Radical Agrarian Futurities in Early Soviet Literature and Culture | Aleksandr Prigozhin | SEK 4,498,000 |
| 25-PR2-0038 | Residual Violence: Wasted Bodies and Environments of Romanian Uranium Mining amidst today’s ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ | Sergiu Novac | SEK 4,311,000 |
| 25-PR2-0031 | Exile activism in the Baltic Sea Region: Analysing the activism of Eastern European political diaspora groups in democratic receiving countries | Magnus Wennerhag | SEK 5,998,000 |
| 25-PR2-0021 | Cataclysm: Environmental Histories of the Holocaust | Emily Rebecca Gioielli | SEK 4,289,000 |
Postdoctoral projects
Funding support for a postdoctoral project is available for an individual researcher who has recently obtained a doctoral degree. The project period is two years and the salary funding may cover 80–100% of a full-time annual position. The Foundation approved three postdoctoral project applications in this year’s application round. The approval rate for the call was 12%.
| Ref. no. | Project title | Project manager | Amount granted |
| 25-PD2-0001 | Networks Carved in Stone: The maritime rock art of the Baltic Sea c. 1400–1800 AD | Anton Larsson | SEK 2,892,000 |
| 25-PD2-0003 | Countering Russian Disinformation: Information Resilience in Wartime and Beyond | Alona Hurkivska | SEK 2,949,000 |
| 25-PD2-0006 | Renewing Europe to Resurrect the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Towianism amidst European Romanticism | Giulio Dalla Grana | SEK 3,085,000 |
Grand projects
‘Grand projects’ are undertaken by a group comprising at least four researchers, with a joint, coherent research task. Grand projects aim to engage in collaboration across subject and institutional boundaries and national borders, and to enable researchers to form a research group that is active in the long term. Within the framework of grand projects funding may be applied for postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. The project period is four or five years and the amount of grant is a maximum of SEK 5 million a year. The Foundation has approved one grand project application in this year’s application round. The approval rate for the call was 25%.
| Ref. no. | Project title | Project manager | Amount granted |
| 25-GP-0003 | Money(-)making empire. Monetary policies and practices in the Swedish Baltic Empire, ca. 1600–1800 | Christopher Pihl | SEK 24,305,000 |
The assessments have been carried out by assessment panels based on the applications and on external experts’ assessments and for grand projects also on an interview with the research group. The Board of the Foundation has followed the recommendations of the assessment panels.
The research projects will start from January 2026. The projects will be conducted at Södertörn University, that acts as the grant administrator.
Granted research projects and research networks are presented in the Foundation’s project database. When the projects and networks have completed their activities, final reports are also posted in the project database. For each project, the publications that the project has resulted in are listed.
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