Career Development at GWZO: the GWZO supports academic careers at all qualification stages – from undergraduate studies to senior academic leadership positions. Central elements of this support are the GWZO's Junior Research Groups (JRG), which are funded either through third-party funding or the institute's main budget. As generally independent research units within the institute, these groups enable promising graduates to pursue doctoral projects within a thematically focused small group. At the same time, they offer postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to design innovative research agendas, usually to carry out third-party-funded research projects together with doctoral candidates, and thus to gain initial experience in academic leadership.

The GWZO Junior Research Group »Contrasting East Central Europe« ran from April 2019 to December 2025. The group examined cultural and social change in East Central Europe in comparison with other European sub-regions and across the world. The group’s research pursued a transnational and transregional approach that opened up the regional focus to the East and to the West and considered the regional processes in a global context. For this, the Junior Research Group drew on current debates in area studies and global studies and combined comparative methods with those of transfer and entanglement. By considering contrasts, crises and caesura, the group’s research used multiple perspectives, dynamic conditions and spatial overlaps as a point of departure for comparison.

The Junior Research Group was led by Dr. Corinne Geering until January 2025. On 1 February 2025, Dr. Corinne Geering was appointed to the tenure-track professorship »Transformative Change in a Social Science and Humanities Perspective« at the Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Within the Junior Research Group, three doctoral projects have so far been successfully completed. Hana Antal conducted research on populism in East Central Europe between 210-2018; Theo Schley examined the relationships between King John of Luxembourg and the civic elites of the Bohemian capital, Prague; and Polina Gundarina researched post-socialist urban development after 1991. Kaja Schelker is currently working on regional architecture in Zakopane from a comparative perspective.