Germany - Collaboration

Collaborations between Oxford academics and their German peers are both extensive and deep. Germany is home to the 2nd largest concentration of Oxford co-authors outside the UK, after the US. Oxford academics collaborate most frequently with the Universität Karlsruhe, Universität Bonn, the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Universität  Hamburg, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The major areas of collaboration are in physics, biochemistry and molecular biology, and physical chemistry. 

Oxford also collaborates with German institutions in the humanities and social sciences. For example, The Anglo-German ‘State of the State’ Fellowship Programme is a five-year collaboration between the Universities of Bremen, Göttingen and Oxford, supported by the German Volkswagen Foundation. The aim of the programme is to enable ten outstanding post-doctoral scholars, who work in the transformation of the modern state (in politics, history, law or economics) to spend up to two years at Oxford. Fellows can also spend a short period in either Bremen or Göttingen as part of their studies.

The Oxford German Network was founded by the German department in 2012 with the support of partners Jesus College, Bodleian Libraries, Magdalen College School and BMW Group Plant Oxford. Its mission is to provide cultural leadership for all those constituencies in Oxford and beyond who have an interest in the German-speaking countries.

It builds on local strengths by facilitating events with local partner schools of all types and participating in the City of Oxford’s twinning arrangement with Bonn. The website is complemented by social media to generate interaction between individuals and organisations, providing information about events, internship opportunities, research projects and not least a German bakery van. The Network emerged from cooperation with the embassies and cultural institutions of Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the “Think German” campaign, and is being recommended to other universities as a follow-on model: “Think German locally”.

The annual Oxford German Olympiad has been received enthusiastically by schools across the UK, and it is to be extended as a multi-disciplinary competition to research level with the support of alumni and partner companies. As a beacon for the study of languages, the Oxford German Network conducts research into the status and uptake of German to promote language provision at national level. By connecting academic institutions, cultural organisations, businesses and policy-makers locally, nationally and internationally, it encourages mutually beneficial cross-cultural cooperation.

An example of an Oxford-German collaboration in the field of law is the ‘CFR in Context’ project which is led by Oxford’s Stefan Vogenauer and Gerhard Dannemann, Professor for English Law, British Economy and Politics, Humboldt University Berlin and Fellow of Oxford’s Institute of European and Comparative Law. The ‘CFR in Context’ project is a collaborative venture bringing together 40 English and German academics to examine the potential impact of the Common Frame of Reference (CFR), a new set of European contract law rules currently being considered by the European Commission. 

Academics work in pairs (one English law specialist and one German law specialist) to produce papers on various aspects of contract law, ranging from unfair competition law issues to property law. The results will be published in book form by Oxford University Press. These are expected to have a major impact on the development of the nascent European contract law in the years to come. 

In the humanities, the Faculty of Theology collaborates regularly with German universities, particularly the University of Bonn with which it holds regular seminars.

The relationship between the Theology Faculty in Oxford and the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Bonn goes back as far as 1977.  Every other year the universities host a joint seminar for graduate students, alternately in Bonn and Oxford. Members of the two faculties have held visiting positions at each others institutions. 

Professor Gerhard Sauter, Emeritus Professor in Bonn and the original architect of the co-operation between Oxford and Bonn, is an Honorary Member of the Oxford Theology Faculty, and Dr John Barton of Oxford has an Honorary Doctorate in Theology from Bonn. The partners are also undertaking a research project, currently led by Professor Paul Fiddes at Regent's Park, in which five members of each Faculty work intensively on a theological topic, resulting in their papers being published collectively: the fifth such volume will be published in late 2012.

Researchers in the Medical Sciences Division are engaged in cutting edge medical research with German colleagues, which is leading to a number of highly significant results

.•    Researchers at Oxford University and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg are studying receptors in the brain called the hippocampal NMDA. They have recently released findings which show that this receptor, which was previously thought to be crucial to special learning, is in fact is not necessary for spatial learning. It is, however, essential for detecting or resolving conflict and in order for people to make the right decision when faced with complex orientation problems. This result is highly significant as it refutes one of the central tenets of neuroscience regarding the function of hippocampal NMDA in spatial learning. 

•    In Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, researchers are collaborating with Neurologische Klinik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany to study a rare disorder, Chorea-Acanthocytosis (ChAc), which leads to progressive neurodegeneration.

‘You, the People’ is an unprecedented network of European-based historians of the United States. It brings together twenty-three scholars from eleven countries to explore the effects of national location on the writing of American history, using Europe as a case study.

The aim of the network is to survey European historiography on the United States since 1945, considering the work of European historians up until the end of the 1980s against the backdrop of the Cold War, and since the 1990s, in the context of American academic hegemony and the internationalization of the US history project, and finally the contrasting political uses of this work on both sides of the Atlantic.

The network will also consider some specific European entries into US history, analysing comparative, transatlantic and Atlantic approaches to history writing. Thanks to a substantial grant from the Leverhulme Trust, this formal network was established in 2010 and based at the History Faculty in Oxford. The network is led by the Oxford Centre for Research in US History (OxCRUSH) and Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines in Paris. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the University of Jena in Germany are also partner institutions.

As well as Oxford’s extensive partnerships with institutions in the region, individual academics at Oxford are collaborating with their German peers across a number of different fields. These collaborations span as broad a subject range as forestry, linguistics, zoology, migration, pharmacology, molecular biology, history, genetics, brain imaging and law.

A recent finding from one such project came from collaboration between archeologists at Oxford and Tübingen Universities which demonstrated that the first modern humans in Europe were playing musical instruments and showing artistic creativity as early as 40,000 years ago.

A team of archeologists and archaeological scientists has carbon dated bones found in the same archaeological layers as a variety of musical instruments and found them to come from the same time period. The instruments take the form of flutes made from bird bones and mammoth ivory. They were excavated at the Geißenklösterle Cave in the Swabian Jura of southern Germany, a region which is widely believed to have been occupied by some of the first modern humans to arrive in Europe. The results of these tests are 2,000- 3,000 years older than previously thought and predate similar sites in other parts of Europe.

Oxford also has strong relationships with the German private and third sectors. A number of German companies and foundations have supported lectureships, fellowships and chairs at the university. These include the Council of the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Stifterverband Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany, among others.

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is the German national agency for the support of international academic cooperation. It offers academic exchange opportunities to students, faculty and researchers and has a strong relationship with Oxford. With the support of the German government, DAAD supports four lecturers at Oxford in Politics, History, Law and German Language and Literature and three German Language College Lecturers in the Department of Modern Languages. In the academic year 2012/13 21 German DAAD Scholarship holders from undergraduate to postdoctoral level were supported to study or conduct research at Oxford.