Dr Sebastian Wielosz

Funding agency: National Science Centre (NCN)
Competition: Sonata 21
Project timeframe: 2026-2028
Project description:
The project focuses on Libri sinici. Neue Sammlung, one of the most valuable yet least studied collections of Chinese and Manchu manuscripts and early printed books preserved in Poland. Housed in the Jagiellonian Library and forming part of the Berlin Collections,  the Libri Sinici comprises more than 200 volumes dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. It includes literary, historical, religious, philosophical, and administrative works, among them exceptionally rare editions and unique copies.
The project aims to produce the first comprehensive critical study of this collection. Research will examine both the physical characteristics of the documents, 
such as paper, bindings, printing techniques, seals, and traces of use, and their textual content, as well as the reconstructing the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced, transmitted, and preserved.
Combining traditional sinological scholarship with the tools of digital humanities, the project offers a multidisciplinary approach to Chinese written heritage and its reception in Europe. The research will provide new insights into intellectual exchanges between East and West and into the role of Chinese texts in the global circulation of knowledge during the early modern period.
The project is carried out in collaboration with the National Central Library of Taiwan in Taipei. Taiwanese specialists will assist in identifying and comparing the Kraków holdings with related materials in Asian collections, enabling a more precise reconstruction of the provenance, history, and significance of individual items.
The project will result in a critical trilingual (Polish, English, and Chinese) study of the collection, published in open access. Its findings will contribute to the development of research on Chinese manuscripts and printed books in Europe, promote knowledge of China’s written cultural heritage, and strengthen the international standing of Polish Sinology.

Dr Aleksandra Kamińska

Funding agency: National Science Centre (NCN)
Competition: MINIATURA 9
Project timeframe: 2025-2026

Project description:
The aim of the project is to review the letters of Charlotte Williams Wynn (1807–1869) to Ludmilla Assing, preserved in the Karl Varnhagen Collection in Kraków, and to conduct preliminary research that will help place this correspondence in its historical and cultural context. The research activities carried out within the project are part of the current field of women’s studies, ranging from an exploration of friendships between women actively involved in cultural life – thereby broadening the understanding of women’s social roles during the crucial cultural transformations of the nineteenth century – to the rediscovery of Charlotte Williams Wynn as a writer deserving renewed scholarly attention. The project also continues ongoing efforts to catalogue and study further parts of the Varnhagen Collection as one of the most important European collections of nineteenth-century manuscripts.

Dr Katarzyna Szarszewska

Funding agency: National Science Centre (NCN), grant no. 2024/53/N/HS2/00724
Competition: PRELUDIUM 23
Project timeframe: 2025-2028

Project description:
One of the largest sub-collections within the Autograph Collection held at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków is the personal estate (Nachlass) of the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), comprising more than 1,000 manuscript items

(BJ, SA 86/1–4 Humboldt, Alexander von). These primarily include letters, but also travel diaries, scholarly treatises, notes, calculation tables, and maps.

The project aims to process selected, previously unpublished and insufficiently studied manuscripts from this collection. In total, 96 letters addressed by Humboldt to seven correspondents will be examined in detail: 33 letters to the Minister of Culture Karl Sigmund Altenstein; 15 to the writer, historian, and editor Otto Friedrich Gruppe; 13 to the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel; 5 to the philologist and theologian Johannes Schulze; 10 to the historian Peter Feddersen Stuhr; 10 to the politician Johann Louis Tellkampf; and 10 to the historian and editor Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen.

The letters will be catalogued and described, then transcribed from German Gothic cursive script (Kurrentschrift) into the Latin alphabet and provided with scholarly commentary. The outcome will be a German-language historical-critical edition of these letters, preceded by an introduction and published in print.

The preparation and publication of this critical edition will make currently difficult-to-access source material available to a wider scholarly audience and significantly promote Humboldt’s epistolary legacy.

The project will partially address an important gap in research on Humboldt’s manuscript legacy. Unlike his published works, his correspondence has not been issued in a comprehensive collected edition and remains largely dispersed across various European archives, including those in Kraków, Berlin, Marbach, Merseburg, Dresden, and Bonn.

Dr Anna Żymełka-Pietrzak

Funding agency: National Science Centre (NCN)
Competition: Miniatura 8
Project timeframe: 2024-2025

Project description:

The aim of this project is to conduct a systematic review of the letters written by women to Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as to gather preliminary information about the female correspondents, their biographies, social positions, and the nature

of their relationships with the German philosopher and writer. The research focuses on manuscripts belonging to the Autograph Collection (Sammlung Autographa), which is part of the so-called “Berlinka” — the collections of the former Prussian State Library in Berlin, housed in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. The collection contains letters from approximately 320 correspondents to Herder, of which about 34 are women (apart from the writer’s wife, Karoline Herder, whose correspondence with her husband has already been edited, and other women from Herder’s family). Among the female authors of letters to Herder are aristocrats, salonnières, poets, writers, and teachers — women who played significant roles in the German intellectual life of their time (including Madame de Staël, Sophie von Schardt, Elisa von der Recke, Emilie von Berlepsch, Duchess Dorothea von Medem, Marie-Elisabeth Polier, Princess Henriette Karoline Luise von Anhalt-Dessau, Caroline von Bremer, and many others).

The implementation of the project follows two parallel paths. On the one hand, it involves a systematic review of women's correspondence to Herder, creating a list of female correspondents along with the most essential information about the manuscripts. On the other hand, it includes library research in Berlin — searching for existing editions of these manuscripts and gathering scholarly literature about these women.

The correspondence under study is almost entirely absent from international scholarly circulation, has not been fully identified and cataloged, and remains unedited. The implementation of this preliminary research project, and consequently a subsequent, broader project (NCN OPUS), will address this gap and shed new light on the intellectual culture of the studied period.

Prof. Jadwiga Kita-Huber and Prof. Frederike Middelhoff

Funding agency: Polish-German Foundation for Science (Deutsch-Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung/Polsko-Niemiecka Fundacja na rzecz Nauki)
Project timeframe: 2024-2025

Project description:
The Polish-German Foundation for Science has awarded funding for a project on the Berlin Collections conducted by the Principal Investigator of DiHeLib, Prof. Jadwiga Kita-Huber, together with Prof. Frederike Middelhoff of Goethe University Frankfurt.

The project focuses on translations and theoretical writings on translation by women who contributed to European cultural life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — materials that remain largely understudied or, in some cases, entirely unexplored. These documents are preserved in the Varnhagen Collection in Kraków.

The aim is to document a representative pilot selection of translations and writings held at the Jagiellonian Library that served as a medium through which female translators disseminated foreign-language literature. The selection constitutes a clearly defined corpus of texts; preliminary research on some of the translators has already been conducted by the applicants and members of the research team.