ERC Advanced Grant for research on language change
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Core Fellow Olesya Khanina, recently appointed Professor of Finno-Ugric Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, has received an ERC Advanced Grant for her project “Uneven Language Change” (UCHANGE). The five-year project (2027–2031) investigates how different levels of language – lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax – change at different rates over time, and how these differences can be used to reconstruct linguistic and social histories.
Using the Uralic language family as a case study, the project develops innovative methods for collecting and annotating large-scale linguistic data across multiple language levels and for modelling long-term language evolution.
“UCHANGE comes at a moment when language data are expanding rapidly, including data for indigenous languages all across the world. However, the new ‘big data’ of historical linguistics can produce meaningful results only if they are compiled and processed by experts in these languages; otherwise no computational methods can save us from the ‘garbage in – garbage out’ effect,” Khanina explains.
By combining historical-comparative linguistics with advanced statistical modelling, the project aims to refine our understanding of language diversification and to provide new tools for reconstructing aspects of human prehistory.
Research Council of Finland funding for project on Václav Havel
Jitka Štollová, a Core Fellow at the Collegium since 2024, will launch her new project, “The Playwright-President: Václav Havel between Theatre and Politics from Prague to the Nordic Stages,” in September 2026. The project examines how Václav Havel (1936–2011) – playwright, essayist, and the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic – used theatrical imagination to shape political action and expression, and how his political experience in turn transformed his writing.
Hosted by the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, the project approaches Havel’s work at the intersection of literature, performance, and politics. Drawing on archives, oral testimony, and theatre records from across Central and Northern Europe, the project traces how ideas of truth and responsibility moved between his plays and political writing. Particular attention is paid to the Nordic context, where Havel’s work continued to be staged during periods of censorship in Czechoslovakia.
“Havel’s deepest subject was the word itself: our ‘responsibility for and toward words’, and the cost of letting them grow hollow,” Štollová emphasizes. “That a Czech dissident playwright is still summoned to make sense of the present, as Mark Carney did at Davos this January, is exactly what the project sets out to explain, by tracing how Havel’s theatre and his politics continually reshaped each other.”
The project also explores how younger generations understand Havel’s legacy today. In addition to Štollová, it involves a postdoctoral researcher, thereby supporting the development of early-career scholarship in the field.
NRF SARChI Chair for Kevin Durrheim
The current Erkko Professor at HCAS, Kevin Durrheim, has been awarded a South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) Chair funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The Chair, Big Data Methods for Societal Monitoring, Technology Development and Training, is hosted by University of Johannesburg and positions the institution at the forefront of African research in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and computational social science.
“This chair builds directly on work undertaken at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies,” Durrheim says. “The interdisciplinary environment at HCAS helped shape its focus on polarization, social cohesion, public discourse, and the societal implications of artificial intelligence, while also laying the foundation for ongoing collaboration between South African and European scholars.”
The Chair will develop advanced methods for monitoring polarization, misinformation, extremism, and social cohesion through machine learning, large language models, and computational analysis of public discourse. A flagship component of the initiative is the creation of a Southern African Quotebank – an open-access digital archive of news media quotations designed to support journalism, democratic monitoring, policy development, and the creation of Africa-centred language models. The Chair will also offer training for a new generation of African researchers through open-access micro-credentials, webinars, and interdisciplinary collaboration in computational social science, digital humanities, and Big Data methods.
Advancing research through community
These successes coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, underscoring its vital role in attracting and supporting outstanding researchers and in strengthening the University of Helsinki’s international profile. The Collegium also warmly acknowledges the many excellent proposals submitted by its fellows, including those not funded in this round, and the collegial peer support through which applicants shared feedback and encouragement as they honed their applications.