A New Order of Things? Transnational Research and Academic Collaboration between the Universities of St Andrews and Bonn
by Seán Allan and Christian Moser
It is not easy to pinpoint exactly when our collaborative ventures first started. One point of departure might be the autumn of 2016 and the start of our co-teaching on the 2-year Joint M. Litt in German and Comparative Literature, a programme established three years earlier in 2013 where PGT students spend their first year at the University of Bonn and their second in St Andrews before graduating with a Masters qualification from both institutions. This is one of the most innovative programmes of its kind in the UK and the fact that it has been supported with scholarships from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for over 10 years reflects the high esteem in which it is held in Germany too.
Both of us have research interests in German literature and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thanks to the Bonn-St Andrews Collaborative Research Grants Programme launched in 2020/21 by the Global Office in St Andrews and Bonn’s International Office, we were able to develop a joint research project entitled ‘Literature, the Arts, and the Transformations of the Public Sphere, 1715–1815’.
Through a critical engagement with the philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, our project sought to analyse the transformation of the public sphere across a range of post-enlightenment societies in Europe. Our aim was to trace the emergence of the modern public sphere in the mid-eighteenth century and to consider how, during the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars, debates conducted in accordance with rational principles increasingly give way to irreconcilable conflicts of opinion.
This project – which spanned the darkest moments of the Covid-19 Pandemic – allowed us to stage two conferences. The first of these took place in December 2021 as a hybrid event in Bonn, while the second in May 2022 was targeted at early career scholars and held in person in St Andrews. It also led to our first joint publication Re-Imagining the Public Sphere in the long 19th Century. Literatur, Theater und das soziale Imaginäre (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2024).
For both of us, providing opportunities for the next generation of scholars is a vital part of our collaboration. As we already have exchanges at both undergraduate and PGT/Masters level, the next logical step was to initiate exchanges between our respective departments at the PGR level. Here the Bonn-St Andrews Global Doctoral Scholarship scheme was invaluable in setting up our first co-tutelle student, Carla Steinbrecher – who graduated last December with a PhD entitled “Chile and the East German Public Sphere” – while our current co-tutelle, Pauline Preisler, is currently in the third year of her thesis on ‘The theatre of imagination in European Romanticism: Novalis, Thomas De Quincey and Gérard de Nerval’.
Graduation of co‑tutelle student Carla Steinbrecher, supported by the Bonn–St Andrews Global Doctoral Scholarship.
For students on these co-tutelle schemes the opportunity to spend 15 months experiencing at firsthand the very different academic cultures in the UK and in Germany gives them a distinct edge in the increasingly globalised world of academia. Most recently, thanks to funding provided by Bonn’s Transdisciplinary Research Area 5 (“Past Worlds and Modern Questions. Cultures Across Time and Space”) we have been able to stage an in-person PGR symposium in Bonn on ‘New Directions in the Humanities’ – and we are hoping to stage a repeat event this year.
We were particularly honoured to have been in the first cohort of Joint Research Professors at Bonn and St Andrews, an initiative that was launched in 2023. It is hard to over-state what a difference it makes to spend a period of up to 7 weeks at our respective universities rather than just a few days. The Bonn-St Andrews Joint Academic Appointments scheme is certainly challenging in terms of organising travel and accommodation, but it makes it possible to cultivate relationships with colleagues from a wide range of different schools, institutes and faculties over a sustained period.
Being in Bonn made it possible to develop contacts with, for example, Jörg Ritter, the director of music in Bonn and to help organise a performance at the Laidlaw Centre of his touring show ‘It’s complicated” about the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara and Robert Schumann. What was particularly pleasing about the event was the involvement of undergraduate students from the Department of German in translating the surtitles for audiences in St Andrews.
Almost inevitably, the bulk of our teaching is targeted at advanced students at PGT and PGR level, but a great deal of our time and energy has been focused on developing complex multi-partner applications for external funding (usually involving a combination of UK and European sources).
Of course, like everyone else, we have had our fair share of unsuccessful outcomes too. But last December we received the news that our application to the joint funding scheme operated by the AHRC and its German equivalent, the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for our project ‘’A New Order of Things’: Social and Cultural Transition in the Epistolary and Journalistic Networks of Heinrich von Kleist’ had been successful and would be funded to the tune of € 980k. The project will be co-delivered together with Prof Elke Dubbels (Osnabrück) and Dr Elystan Griffiths (Birmingham) and will provide funding two postdoc positions, one in the UK and one in Germany.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a German Romantic writer and our project will map out his epistolary and journalistic networks across five key areas: (1) Politics; (2) the Military; (3) Economics; (4) Means of Communication and Travel; and (5) Visual Arts. It is our belief that to understand fully the social and political implications of his journalism and letter-writing, a new methodological approach—one less individual-centred and more oriented towards creative networks—is required. By positioning Kleist’s work within broader creative and intellectual networks, we hope to provide an analytical and interpretative model for the future study of ‘networked’ nineteenth-century cultures that moves away from paradigms of creativity typically focused on the lone (male) genius.
While we are excited at the new research opportunities that our AHRC-DFG funding will open up, we are particularly delighted that, at the very point when our 3-year Joint Research Professorships are about to come to an end, the external funding our positions have enabled us to access, will make it possible for us to extend our collaborative endeavours for a further three years.
From the time, we embarked on this journey in 2016, we have been accompanied every step of the way by Sam Lister and her team at the Global Office in St Andrews and Katharina Fuchs-Bodde and her associates at Bonn’s International Office. So many people – too numerous to mention individually – have also helped us settle in to new and unfamiliar surroundings, tackle German and British bureaucracy, and manage the different expectations and traditions of two contrasting academic cultures. But the experience of seeing things from a different perspective while meeting and engaging with new academic partners has been both fascinating and fruitful – and something we hope will continue throughout the duration of our new project.
Seán Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews and Joint Research Professor für Neuere Deutsche Literatur at the University of Bonn, and Christian Moser is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn, and Joint Research Professor for German at the University of St Andrews
Learn more about the University of Bonn-University of St Andrews strategic partnership.