The Study of Europe

The study of Europe takes place in a series of specialist centres and departments. The European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of Europe, particularly in politics, history and international relations. The Centre’s research projects include investigations into welfare reform, civil resistance, the study of freedom, European Muslims, and media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe to name just a few.

Within the Centre, South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the relationship between European integration and the politics, economics and societies of the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. St Antony’s is also home to the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre which brings together academics and researchers focused on Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

This research centre is complemented by the Russian and East European Studies programme in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies which is home to graduate studies and research into the region. 

Oxford is a leading centre for the study of European history. The new Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR), based at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies is a research hub which brings together experts from several disciplines including history, archaeology and classics. It hosts seventy scholars, including 19 professors - an unusually high number - of which 13 are Fellows of the Royal Academy.

The Modern European History Research Centre (MEHRC) within the History Faculty has consolidated Oxford’s position as the largest and foremost centre in the world for research on European history since the Renaissance. The MEHRC has research programmes with partner institutions in the USA, Norway, the Netherlands, France and Germany.

Cantemir Institute
Another research centre in the Faculty of History is the recently established Cantemir Institute (CI) which focuses on the interdisciplinary study of Central and Eastern Europe in its wider European, Eurasian, Mediterranean, and global contexts. The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the European Humanities Research Centre are both interdisciplinary centres for the study of European cultures and languages.  

In the social sciences, the Department of Politics and International Relations offers European specific study through its MPhil in European Politics and Society. The Institute of European and Comparative Law aims to enhance the European dimension of the Law Faculty’s teaching and research activities. It works to strengthen links with other major European institutions, to expose Oxford students to other legal jurisdictions in Europe, and to deepen inter-disciplinary collaboration within Oxford.  

The Faculty of Music also hosts the annual conference of the Russian and East European Music (REEM) study group, which is part of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). Some of REEM’s purposes are to foster collaborative research and exchange of ideas on Russian and East European music within a growing scholarly community in the UK and abroad; to foster research links between scholars working in music and Slavic departments in the UK; to provide a forum for academics and postgraduates to exchange ideas and meet one another at regular conferences; to support and encourage postgraduate research into Russian and East European Music.

Beyond specialist centres, teams of researchers from all over the University’s departments focus their research on all corners of Europe.

• In Western Europe, researchers at the Health Economics Research Centre have conducted studies looking at the cost of dementia care provided by family and carers in western European countries.

• In Eastern Europe, the Oxford Institute of Ageing has set up one of its three regional networks on ageing named EAST.

• In Southern Europe, a team from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have been carbon dating a knucklebone found under a church floor in Bulgaria which is suspected to have belonged to John the Baptist.

• In Northern Europe, Oxford zoologists are looking at the spread of blue tongue cattle disease.

Each of these provides just one example of the multitude of projects being undertaken by Oxford’s faculty.

Bodleian Library
The University’s libraries and museum also house an exceptional collection of European artefacts and resources. The Bodleian library holds extensive books and manuscript relating to and written by Europeans, including some incredibly rare and unique items. It has a collection of over 7,000 books printed before 1500 AD (known as incunabula) mainly sourced from Western Europe including The Elements of Euclid, AD 888, the oldest surviving manuscript of what would become Euclid's Elements; a manuscript of Marco Polo's Travels from the 14th century; and one of only five Kennicott illuminated Hebrew Bibles, made in 1476 at Corunna in north-west Spain.

Taylorian Library
The Taylor Bodleian Slavonic and Modern Greek Library holds an extensive range of materials for East European literary and linguistic studies and has one of the country’s leading collections in this field.

Bate Collection
In the University’s Bate Collection, one of the most magnificent collections of musical instruments in the world, there are over 2,000 instruments from the Western orchestral music traditions from the renaissance, through the baroque, classical, romantic and up to modern times.

Oxford Digital Library
Amongst its digital collections in the Oxford Digital Library, the University holds an archive of the archaeological records and papers of Sir Arthur Evans (Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, 1884-1908), which in the most part relate to his excavations at the Bronze Age site of Knossos on Crete, carried out between 1900 and 1931.