Award for the ZILAS Team

This year’s Maximilian Bickhoff University Foundation Award honours ZILAS as a platform for dialogue across disciplines and borders. For four decades, the Central Institute for Latin American Studies at KU has brought together perspectives from different fields and has strengthened academic engagement with Latin America in research, teaching, and public dialogue.

As part of its 40th anniversary, ZILAS will host the seventh Maximilian Bickhoff Colloquium on 11 June 2026. The colloquium focuses on Latin America as a world region where major transformations of our time become particularly visible: political upheavals, ecological crises, social polarisation, and geopolitical shifts.

The event not only addresses current developments in Latin America, but also asks how academia can respond to times of profound change by offering orientation, opening up critical perspectives, and creating new forms of dialogue.

ZILAS is very grateful for this special recognition and sees it as an encouragement to further strengthen interdisciplinary and international exchange.

Information box

40 Years of ZILAS
Seventh Maximilian Bickhoff Colloquium
11 June 2026
Programme: ku.de/zilas40