European Studies Centre

General information

Beside its permanent Fellows, the Centre has Visiting Fellows from several European countries, as well as graduate students from all parts of the world working on European affairs. We also participate in several international research projects. Seminars and workshops on a wide range of topics are held regularly at the Centre. These involve Oxford scholars from all disciplines and their counterparts from abroad, often with the active participation of students. A number of special lectures and international conferences, bringing both leading academics and distinguished practitioners to Oxford, are offered to a wider audience under the auspices of the Centre.

The Centre was established in 1976 with a generous endowment from the Volkswagen Foundation. We therefore celebrated our thirtieth anniversary in 2006. The seminar room has a small reference library, which all members of the University interested in European Studies are welcome to consult. The main library holdings on Europe are housed in the central College library, where there is an extensive collection of books and periodicals relating to modern European history and politics.

When it was founded, during the Cold War, the Centre was called the West European Studies Centre. To recognise the changes that followed the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the artificial geopolitical division of the continent into “West” and “East”, the Centre was re-named the European Studies Centre in 1990. Increasingly, the affairs of the post-communist states of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe have come to be studied in this Centre. However, we continue to work closely with colleagues in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre in respect of eastern Europe. We have a special programme devoted to south-eastern Europe, now entitled South East European Studies at Oxford. This also concerns itself with Turkish affairs, in close co-operation with colleagues in the Middle East Centre. The European Studies Centre therefore aspires to study the affairs of the whole of Europe and of Europe as a whole.