The Department of German is currently involved in a number of collaborative research projects, all of which have been facilitated by external grants and involve international teams of scholars.

Normalisation & Beyond
This is the first of two schemes funded by the British Academy with a view to  promoting collaborative work between researchers working in the area of modern German history, politics and culture in institutions in the UK, the USA and Germany. The specific focus of the project is the concept of "normalisation"in Germany post-1989, and particularly since the mid-1990s.

Screening Identities
Our second "networks" project, "Screening Identities", investigates the reconfiguration of  political identity as represented in contemporary European cinema.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the project's launch in Cologne

‘Kölner Ausgabe’
Work on this project commenced in 1997 and will continue until 2010. The first of the 27 volumes of scholarly edition of the writer Heinrich Böll's complete works were launched at a press conference by the Federal Chancellor in October 2002 and widely reported in the German media. It is funded by a range of institutions including the Federal Office of Culture and the State of North-Rhine Westphalia.
In 2003-2004, Dr Ruth Owen, MHRA Research Associate will be attached to the project in Leeds.


Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) was one of Germany's leading intellectual figures in the postwar period. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.