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Nearly One Million Swiss Francs in SNSF Funding for a Research Project by Bernhard C. Schär

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) is supporting a new research project led by Prof. Dr Bernhard C. Schär, Professor of Global History of Europe and Switzerland at UniDistance Suisse, with funding of CHF 983,916.

The project, entitled “Colonial Collecting and Its Afterlives. Human Remains and the Transformation of the Human Sciences in Switzerland (1850–Present)”, will begin in 2027 and run for four years. Bernhard C. Schär will lead the project as Principal Investigator.

The project focuses on how human remains came to be housed in Swiss museums and university collections, and on the role that colonialism played in this process. A survey conducted in 2025 by Bernhard C. Schär’s research group highlights the scale of the issue: more than 27,000 human remains are held in Swiss collections. At least 4,175 of these were acquired during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in former European colonies.

The research will examine how these collections were established, which individuals and institutions were involved, and how they shaped the development of scientific disciplines and ideas about human differences. In doing so, the project also addresses the still highly relevant question of how to responsibly manage human remains originating from colonial contexts.

Researchers and experts from various Swiss and international institutions will contribute to the project. Caroline Montebello, a postdoctoral researcher at UniDistance Suisse, will participate as a member of the research team. The project will also develop a research database documenting, among other things, the provenance of the remains and the networks involved in their collection and circulation.

In addition to the SNSF grant, UniDistance Suisse will provide a matching grant of CHF 60,000 through its internal funding programme.

More about Prof. Dr Bernhard C. Schär