Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

”Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond” was the largest project to date developed by colleagues at the Centre for British Studies and Oxford. It is led by the Centre’s fellow Prof Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College, Oxford) and Prof Gesa Stedman.

During the summer of 2021, the three-part exhibition of the same title could be visited in Oxford and Berlin. Currently, a travelling exhibition is being developed, based on the part of the exhibition that was shown at Humboldt-Universität.

The project website happy-in-berlin.org documents how writers ranging from Christopher Isherwood to the less well-known Alix Strachey experienced Berlin, which places were important to them, and what they wrote about their time in Berlin.

The five-part podcast series which accompanied the project is available here.

The accompanying catalogue can be found here.

For more information, please contact Prof Stedman at gesa.stedman@staff.hu-berlin.de

Lectures, Events, Meetings and Future Projects

The Centre has been strongly involved in the Oxford-Berlin Partnership from the start and continues to support it with a number of events and projects.

Currently, we are preparing our Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften Project which will show the travelling exhibition “Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond” at the Lichthof (atrium) in the main building Unter den Linden. The event will take place on 17 June 2023 and will include a writer’s talk and curators’ tours.

A smaller project on translating silences in poetry will take place in Oxford in June and in Berlin in September, organised together with Prof Kate McLoughlin, Harris Manchester College.

Prof Miles Taylor is setting up an early-career focused seminar series on medical humanities, with the Charité and Oxford partners. The first meeting of this new venture will take place in Oxford in May 2023.

Our highly popular annual Oxford-Berlin Lecture series continues, most recently with a lecture by Prof Rana Mitter (February 2023).

One of the Centre’s longest-standing Oxford-Berlin co-operations is run by our law professor, Gerhard Dannemann:

The Oxford University Comparative Law Forum promotes the study and discussion of legal issues from a comparative perspective by taking full advantage of the benefits of online publication as a fast, cheap and widely accessible means for publishing serious academic writing. It was founded by Gerhard Dannemann in the year 2000 when he was still teaching at the University of Oxford. He remained general editor of OUCLF when he took up a professorship at the Centre for British Studies in 2003.  He is presently supported by Dr Sam McIntosh, Lecturer in Law at the Centre, as Assistant Editor, and Leo Kämpfe, student assistant at the Centre, as HTML editor. With continuing support from Oxford's Law Faculty, including several co-editors, OUCLF is an example of longstanding and ongoing cooperation between Humboldt Universität and the University of Oxford.

Past Events