Call for expression of interest for MSCA Postdoctoral fellowships

We are an interdisciplinary research centre with the status of a UNESCO category 2 institution at the School of Humanities, University of Iceland. The centre currently has three main thematic programmes: Multilingualism and multilingual education; Romani written heritage, language and culture; Minority, Indigenous language and language contact in the Arctic, West Nordic and the Nordic-Baltic area.

We invite expressions of interest for postdoctoral fellowships aligned with our thematic programmes, in fields including:

• Multilingualism and language learning;
• Heritage and minority languages;
• Sociolinguistics, including historical sociolinguistics;
• Language policy and planning;
• Translation studies and interpreting;
• Intercultural communication;
• Linguistic human rights;
• Digital humanities and language technologies;
• Discourse studies and narrative analysis;
• Migration, mobility, and language;
• Endangered languages and language revitalisation;
• Romani studies;
• Indigenous studies and Arctic humanities;
• Media and representation of linguistic and cultural minorities.

We are located in Veröld hús Vigdísar on the university campus in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, and we closely collaborate with the Faculty of Languages and Cultures and numerous other research organisations throughout Europe and America that work in our area. You can read more about the University of Iceland, the country’s leading and oldest university, here.

Your MSCA supervisor will be part of our team or group of programme advisers. We will actively support applicants in writing their MSCA proposal with particular focus on advanced training, international, interdisciplinary, and inter-sectoral mobility. Our centre aims to bridge academia and practice, and we are well-suited to provide placement or secondments in a non-academic environment at the UNESCO Headquarters, which could strengthen the application.

Postdoctoral candidates may be of any nationality, have a maximum of 8 years of postdoctoral research experience, and must not have resided or carried out their main activities in Iceland for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before 9 September 2026 (the call deadline). More about the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 can be read here.

Application

An expression of interest shall be sent by email to Sofiya Zahova, zahova@hi.is, by 27 April 2026.

Your email should contain:

• A short CV including a list of publications
• An outline of your research proposal (maximum two pages).
• The contact information of two referees who know your research work

If your research proposal is short-listed, we will schedule a call to discuss your application. Our team will assist you in identifying a supervisor and will provide guidance and review throughout the preparation of your application.

We plan two workshops for candidates with whom we will work: one in mid-May and the second one in late June.

Note that the opening date for the MSCA-PF call is scheduled for 9 April 2026, and the deadline for submission to the European Union is 9 September 2026.

For more information and inquiries regarding hosting your MSCA postdoctoral application with us, contact Sofiya Zahova, zahova@hi.is.

We look forward to welcoming you to the Vigdís International Centre and the University of Iceland!