Presentation of the Immanuel Kant Research Prize

The Immanuel Kant Research Prize of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) will be awarded for the first time on 15 June at 6.00 pm. Interested parties can register for the subsequent public conference "Cultural Landscapes" until 8 June.

Oldenburg's Lord Mayor Prof. Dr Gerd Schwandner and Prof. Dr Gunilla Budde, Vice-President of the University of Oldenburg for Studies and Teaching, will address the award ceremony. Dr Michael Roik, Head of Department at the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, will give the keynote address.

The prize, named after the great Königsberg philosopher and Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), honours outstanding dissertations and post-doctoral theses that deal with the culture and history of Germans in Eastern Europe and their interactions with neighbouring peoples. This year it goes to the Zurich art historian Dr des. Britta Dümpelmann ("Veit Stoß and the Krakow Marienretabel. Mediale Zugänge, mediale Perspektiven"), the Berlin anti-Semitism researcher Dr des. Tim Buchen ("Antisemitism in Galicia. Agitation, violence and politics against Jews in the Habsburg monarchy around 1900") and the Lithuanian historian Dr Vasilijus Safronovas ("The competition of identity ideologies in a city of the Western Baltic region: research on the example of Memel in the 20th century"). Dümpelmann and Buchen will receive prize money of 2,500 euros for their dissertations and Safronovas will receive 5,000 euros for the translation of his habilitation thesis into German. The laudatory speech will be given by Prof Dr Thomas Wünsch, historian at the University of Passau and Chair of the Immanuel Kant Research Prize jury.

The international conference "Cultural Landscapes" will take place from Friday to Sunday, 15 to 17 June, at the BKGE. Speakers are academics from Germany, the USA, Poland and Qatar. They will address the conference topic in five sections and deal with imagined, remembered, contested or integrated landscapes, with landscapes before and after 1945 as well as with theoretical foundations and didactic concepts. In their presentations, the researchers will examine questions such as whether landscapes have a historical memory or how far the "German East reached".

The conference languages are German and English. Participation is free of charge. Registration for the award ceremony and the conference "Cultural Landscapes. Transatlantic Perspectives on the Effects and Impacts of German Culture and History in Eastern Europe" by 8 June 2012 to the BKGE by email: bkge@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de or phone: 0441/96195-52.

Representatives of the press are cordially invited to both events.