Postdoctoral Residency

Are you a scholar under the age of 35 and currently doing your research under a postdoctoral fellowship contract with a university? If so, Iméra, The Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille Université offers you the possibility of spending from three to five months of your research contract in a unique work and living settings, where scientists and artists from all over the world and all disciplines significantly transform the most common frameworks for thought and action.

Iméra is a sanctuary of intellectual freedom where a temporary community of high-level international scientists and artists can find the time, the space, and the resources needed to discover, individually and with others, new meaning and content for original interdisciplinary research.

In a place where conditions are so different from the academic and artistic routine, important ideas and works may emerge. Creations capable of modifying the boundaries and the established paradigms, or even significantly transforming the most widespread frameworks today to think and act.

An institute for advanced study is at the same time a scientific utopia – the best possible university – and a living alternative to existing academic institutions – another kind of university.

Why submit an application?

What difference can a residence make in an institute for advanced study for you? What particular experiences and offers can we provide?

• In a career phase of pressure, stress, new and time-consuming challenges, you will find space, time and support for research, intellectual and academic development.

• In a career phase when personal and scientific autonomy is undermined by overly close and conditional university ties, you will find individual freedom, independence and autonomy as a necessary basis for your research.

• In a career phase with a strong focus on individual success, you will find a scholar’s community, communication and possible new networks for your research. After a discipline-specific PhD, you will find interdisciplinarity, reflexivity, criticism and openness as driving factors of your research.

What can we offer you?

The opportunity to spend a short-term residency, from three to five months of your postdoctoral research at Iméra during the year 2025-26.

You will be provided with free accommodation in one of Iméra’s fourteen apartments, located in the Parc Longchamp in Marseille, one of the most fascinating and extreme cities in Europe:  a historical melting pot and a “refuge city”, “port city”, “transit city”, “Mediterranean city”. You will live and work in a small campus located on a hill where for centuries astronomers have observed and searched for comets, a few hundred meters from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe.

You will benefit from an office in an open co-working space.

You will participate to the CBS (Community Building Seminar), the only mandatory time of collective activity for each resident at Iméra, which takes place regularly during the year (3 hours on Thursday morning), intended as a moment of mutualization of knowledge, meetings and exchanges sometimes unexpected, a real collective intelligence device.

An active knowledge of French and/or English (written and spoken) is essential. Linguistic skills in both languages are desirable due to the bilingual context of Iméra: for example, weekly seminars (see below) are held in both languages. Laureates who are not fluent in French are encouraged to familiarize themselves with it during their stay, if not beforehand.

Residency periods

The candidate must select a period between three and five months, which must fall within one of the following two periods:

• Three-five month residency in the first semester: September 1, 2025 to January 30, 2026.
• Three-five month residency in the second semester: from February 9, 2026 to July 3, 2026.

Publication of selection

Between early February 2025 and early March 2025.

Eligibility criteria

• To be less than thirty-five years old;
• To have a postdoctoral contract at the time of the residency, which enables a research residency abroad of at least three months;
• Must not have lived in France for more than twelve months within the three years prior to this call for applications.