OXFORD GERMAN NETWORK

Oxford-German Research Links

Martin Booth, Fellow in Engineering

Martin Booth, Fellow in Engineering

Dr Martin Booth, a Fellow of the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University, has won a prestigious research prize awarded by a university in Erlangen, Germany. Martin won the Young Researcher Award for his pioneering work in optics for microscopy and photonic engineering.

In addition to a research grant of 100,000 Euros, Martin will have the status of professor for four years at the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technology (SAOT). During this time he will run research projects at the Graduate School in Erlangen, and will contribute to the teaching there.

Erlangen is a small city in northern Bavaria with a large university and several research institutes. Martin said: “The School of Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT) will be an excellent place to pursue collaborative research in optical engineering.

The University of Erlangen-Nürnberg has a long and respected history in the field of optics and the SAOT has brought together many researchers from across different disciplines. I am looking forward to working with other researchers there over the next few years. It will also be good to work again in Germany, as my research career started with a placement in Göttingen over 15 years ago.”

Science across German-British Borders

Dr Kylie Vincent leads a research group in the Chemistry Department at Oxford University and is a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Her research is underpinned by a strong collaboration with Biologists in Berlin, and she was recently awarded the Clara Immerwahr Award for Excellence in Catalysis Research from the Berlin-based UniCat cluster. She has facilitated a number of student exchange visits between Oxford University and Humboldt University in Berlin.

Kylie Vincent at work

Click here to read Kylie's article about enzymes, exchange and eight years of scientific discovery in Berlin, "this fascinating city full of surprises".

**Franz Kafka's Amerika (1927)**

Dr Carolin Duttlinger (University of Oxford) recently gave a talk for Source - a magazine for contemporary photography - on Kafka's use of photography in his unfinished novel Amerika - now known under its modern title Der Verschollene. He started writing it between 1911 and 1914, but it was only published posthumously in 1927. The novel tells the story of a teenage boy who must emigrate to America and follows his social decline.

Watch Carolin talk about her research here and look at a copy of the 1927 edition here (digitised by the University and State Library in Düsseldorf).

Early Modern Festival Books Database

The Early Modern Festival Books Database presents more than 3000 festival books published between 1500 and 1800 in 12 languages, including German. These are printed accounts commissioned by kings and princes, by cities, and by the church to record celebratory events. Some of them are splendidly illustrated, but many consist of a plain prose account of the festival concerned. The database is an expanded and fully revised version of the bibliographical and historical handbook Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800 by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and Anne Simon (London: Continuum, 2000), and it now also provides links to a digitized version of the texts, wherever such a version exists. Click here to search the freely available database.

German medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library

Start of St. Matthew’s Gospel. Calligraphy from Fulda, earlier 9th century, later at St. Kylian’s, Würzburg.

Oxford’s Bodleian Library holds a wealth of medieval manuscripts from the German-speaking lands. Several new projects are currently engaged with cataloguing the holdings, which make a significant contribution to the study of Germanic medieval heritage and religious culture.

To find out more about these manuscripts and about the research being conducted at Oxford University, click here.

Tercentenary – Frederick the Great in Oxford

2012 was the 300th anniversary of the birth of one of Germany’s most well-known and influential rulers: Frederick the Great, Prussian King from 1740 until his death in 1786. He had wide-ranging interests and was a brilliant military strategist. Frederick is credited with modernising the Prussian state, providing it with the infrastructure to become a leading European power. Oxford celebrated Frederick’s birthday as well – to find out more about the research and events in Oxford around the tercentenary, click here.

Research Profiles

Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800

Headed by Prof. Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, and a leading scholar in early modern culture, German literature, and gender questions, this HERA-funded project investigates the role of foreign consorts as agents, instruments or catalysts of cultural and dynastic transfer in early modern Europe (1500-1800). The project team includes scholars from the UK, Germany, Poland and Sweden, each of whom is conducting research into a transnational case study. The consorts studied have been chosen because they reveal cultural synergies between northern (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Britain), eastern (Poland-Lithuania), and southern (Italy, Spain, Portugal) Europe.

Oxford University Babylab

The Oxford University Babylab is looking for bilingual babies growing up in a German and English speaking family, to participate in a study on bilingualism. They are looking for children aged 2 years and younger. Click here to find out more about OU Babylab and here to find out more about Babylab's bilingualism study.

Oxford Kafka Research Centre

The centre aims to advance and co-ordinate research on Franz Kafka, and more generally on German-language and especially German-Jewish literature and culture in the period of Modernism. It particularly aims to encourage interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches.

To find out more about the project and the conferences, workshops, and special lectures it has organised, click here.

Writing Brecht: an international project

Writing Brecht is an international research and translation project devoted to extending and developing the corpus of Bertolt Brecht’s works in English. The project is led by St Hugh’s Fellow, Dr Tom Kuhn: a leading scholar of Brecht in the English-speaking world.

Writing Brecht incorporates a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project, ‘Brecht into English’, which proposes a parallel critical appraisal of the transmission of Brecht’s writings and ideas, and a historical assessment of the reception of Brecht in the English-speaking world. The aspiration is to advance our understanding of the ways in which not just Brecht, but foreign literatures in general, negotiate cultural difference. Find out more by visiting the website here.