Prof. Dr. Dagmar Coester-Waltjen appointed as the Director of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg

The Lichtenberg-Kolleg, an institution established to further the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the context of the institutional strategy of Göttingen University, will be headed by Prof. Dr. Dagmar Coester-Waltjen. This law scholar who has been working with Munich University has been called to the Faculty of Law at Göttingen in consultation with the foundation committee. She will assume the professorship for German, European, and International Private Law and Litigation Law. The 63-year-old took up office as the Director of the LichtenbergKolleg on 1 October 2008. Prof. Dr. Kurt von Figura, the President of Göttingen University, says: “With Dagmar Coester-Waltjen we have managed to obtain a renowned researcher and an experienced science manager for the realisation of one of the most important measures within the Excellence Initiative.”


Prof. Dr. Kurt von Figura, the President of Göttingen University, welcomes Prof. Dr. Dagmar Coester-Waltjen, Director of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg.


Dagmar Coester-Waltjen (born in 1945) studied Law at Freiburg, Munich, and Kiel, where she received her doctoral degree in 1971. During a year abroad at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor she acquired a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.). In the following years she served as an assistant lecturer at Augsburg and Munich, where she received her professorial lecturing qualification in 1982. After serving as a professor at the universities of Constance and Hamburg she was called to Munich in 1988 to become a professor for Civil Law, International Private Law and Comparative Law. She refused calls to Kiel and Zurich (Switzerland).


Coester-Waltjen spent time in China, Israel, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the USA as a visiting professor. She has been active in the field of science management since 1994 holding different posts; amongst others, she is a member of the advisory boards of two Max Planck Institutes – she is the head of the advisory board of the MPI for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) – as well as of the Advisory Council of the Faculty of Law at Oxford. She is also a member of the Academia Europaea (London) and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She has followed invitations to Japan and South Korea for research assignments. Dagmar Coester-Waltjen has been awarded the German Cross of Merit on ribbon and the highest Bavarian state decoration.


The Lichtenberg-Kolleg serves the goal of identifying and developing important research ideas and activities in the Humanities and the Social Sciences in collaboration with internationally renowned researchers. Following the “traditional” idea of a college, the Lichtenberg-Kolleg affords the necessary freedom for outstanding researchers to focus on research, to engage in lively scientific exchange, and to entertain specialist as well as cross-subject cooperation – working together in the same place. The choice of fellows is determined by their scientific excellence in fields which are already positioned at Göttingen University in the form of research initiatives in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.