Prof. Ayelet Shachar receives a 2019 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the top research award in Germany

Prof. Ayelet Shachar has been awarded a 2019 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, one of 10, for her groundbreaking work on citizenship and the legal frameworks of multicultural societies. Awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Leibniz Prize is the most significant research award in Germany and comes with 2.5 million Euros in research money.

Shachar is professor of law and political science at the University of Toronto, and the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She has published and lectured widely on citizenship theory, immigration law, multiculturalism, cultural diversity and women's rights, law and religion in comparative perspective, highly skilled migration and global inequality.

In the Foundation’s citation of Shachar’s award, it said: “More recently, Shachar has turned her attention to the phenomenon of shifting borders, the resolution of nation-state border regimes with a clearly defined territory into flexible and variable zones, and areas in which more intensive control and surveillance measures are permitted.”

The 2019 awardees were selected from 122 nominees. Three prizewinners are from the humanities and social sciences, three from the life sciences, two from the natural sciences and two from the engineering sciences. Seven past Leibniz prizewinners have subsequently gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.

Read the full press release here.