At this year's President's Dinner on Friday, 17 November 2023, prizes were awarded for outstanding teaching, special research achievements and impressive social commitment.
Veronika Rudolf received the Bayreuth "Golden Raven" teaching award for her course "Feminist Film Theory". The content of the seminar consisted of a historical overview of feminist movements, also independent of film, a critical examination of Freud's psychoanalysis from a film theory perspective, an overview of influential texts and works of feminist film theory and the application of the content learnt to film examples.
Veronika Rudolf used a dynamic structure in her course to allow students to express their wishes and interests, to which the upcoming seminar content was then adapted - without losing sight of their self-planned goals.
Veronika Rudolf studied "Theatre and Media" and the Master's programme "Intercultural Anglophone Studies" at the University of Bayreuth. Since October 2021, she has been working as a research assistant in the Media Studies department and is doing her doctorate at the Chair of Media Studies under Prof Dr Matthias Christen.
The "Bayreuth Teaching Award for Digitally Supported Teaching" honours lecturers with a particular commitment to the design of teaching and learning processes using digital resources. This year, Dr Maximilian Mayer, research assistant at the Chair of Business Taxation at Faculty III, received the award. The award relates to his course entitled "Technik des betrieblichen Rechnungswesens I: Buchführung und Abschluss ". The challenge of the course is to help the very heterogeneous students to learn a topic that is perceived as "boring" in the context of a large group and thus to succeed in the exam. To achieve this goal, Maximilian Mayer has developed the web application "Erfolgsneural". Students are guided through the individual teaching units on this digital platform, which is characterised by the transparency of the learning objectives, the provision of teaching content (slides) and a variety of exercises.
Maximilian Mayer studied business administration at LMU Munich, where he successfully completed his master's degree in 2018. Immediately afterwards, he joined the Chair of Business Taxation at the University of Bayreuth as a research assistant, where he also completed his doctorate in 2022.
In January 2023, he also successfully completed a tax consultant exam. In 2022, Maximilian Mayer was already honoured with the Christian Karl Schmitt Prize 2021 for particularly good teaching by the RW Faculty of the University of Bayreuth.
The DAAD Prize was awarded to Sitara Nath in 2023. She impresses with her outstanding academic achievements and remarkable commitment in the social and intercultural field. She is an expert in the areas of diversity, equality and inclusion, migration research and gender-specific advocacy.
Sitara Nath wrote her final thesis in the Bayreuth Master's programme "Philosophy and Economics" on the topic "Risk of Hermeneutical Injustice: An Epistemological Analysis of E.U. Credibility Practices in Sexual Orientation-Based Asylum Claims", which was awarded the top grade of 1.
The thesis fulfils the highest standards in terms of writing style and philosophical content on this socially and politically highly relevant topic. "It is the best Master's thesis I have ever supervised, which reflects her active engagement during our discussion rounds and her academic commitment throughout the writing process," said the thesis supervisor and reviewer, Prof Dr Cristina Borgoni-Concalves, Professor of Philosophy - Epistemology at the University of Bayreuth.
However, the award not only honours Sitara Nath's academic achievements. It recognises the fact that, in addition to her academic achievements, the prizewinner is also active in the social and intercultural sphere for society. For several years, she has been intensively involved in various initiatives on the topics of gender, migration and diversity. Since January 2022, she has been the Advocacy and Engagement Officer at the Centre for Migration, Gender and Justice (CMGJ), a human rights NGO based in Stuttgart, Germany. She also co-authored a civil society shadow report, to be published in 2023, examining the inclusion of migration issues in the German government's implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Her advocacy work also extends to the local level in Bayreuth. In 2021, she organised initiatives to promote diversity in the Philosophy & Economis community and coordinated an event on women in philosophy that addressed gender-specific challenges in the field of philosophy. In addition, as a student assistant in the Gender and Diversity Office of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, she is currently curating a literature database that addresses critical diversity, intersectionality and feminist scholarship for the broader research community.
An important part of his work is the theorisation of a changing, increasingly pluralistic world order. It is thanks to his intellectual openness that Dr Raoul Bunskoek has contributed to the understanding of a 'global China', always embedded in relevant traditions of thought as well as everyday knowledge and practices.
Dr Raoul Bunskoek has made a name for himself internationally through numerous publications in leading journals and renowned publishing houses as well as with the publication of the book "China and International Theory: The Balance of Relationships" (2019, with Chih-yu Shih et al.).
Dr Raoul Bunskoek is a dedicated advocate for his international colleagues both on and off campus.
His students not only appreciate his teaching skills, which he most recently demonstrated in the summer semester in the course "China in Africa", but also his dedicated support and intensive mentoring, both with regard to their academic careers and their life planning. Even as a non-Bayreuth resident, he is keen to familiarise international students with Franconian culture through joint activities. He is also involved outside the university, for example in kindergarten, school and sports clubs.
Lord Mayor Thomas Ebersberger awarded the prize of the City of Bayreuth at the President's Dinner. Dr Sophie Hermann, André Reinelt and Dr Yannik Jännsch were honoured for their outstanding dissertations.
Dr Sophie Hermann received the prize for her dissertation, in which she covers a wide range of topics in theoretical physics. The title of the thesis is: "Forces and symmetries in the statistical mechanics of active and thermal many-body systems".
The thesis was supervised by Prof Dr Matthias Schmidt, Chair of Theoretical Physics II, as part of his doctorate in Faculty I of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science.
In his dissertation, which was recently published as a book by Nomos Verlag, André Reinelt focussed on the topic of "Social Inclusion. Der allgemeine Gleichheitssatz als Zugangsregel im Vertragsrecht" (Social Inclusion. The General Principle of Equality as an Access Rule in Contract Law) deals with the constellations underlying the Federal Constitutional Court's stadium ban decision (BVerfGE 148, 267) and other cases not covered by the General Equal Treatment Act, in which a private law actor provides its (service) benefits to all in principle, but refuses access to certain persons.
Using the example of stadium bans, Reinelt develops an analytical model that describes the social conflict in order to be able to explain and apply the horizontal effect of the general principle of equality in the next step.
Dr Yannick Jännsch also received the City of Bayreuth Prize for his doctorate, which was awarded summa cum laude and contributed to the global energy transition.
The title of the thesis is: "Electrochemical CO2 reduction by pulsed electrolysis: development and optimisation of an ethene-selective, long-term stable and scalable process". The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr Ralf Moos, Chair of Functional Materials, as part of his doctorate in the Faculty of Engineering.
The Science Prize of the Universitätsverein Bayreuth e.V. is awarded annually for outstanding academic achievements in the promotion of young scientists at the University of Bayreuth. This year, it was presented to Dr Felix M. Wilke by Dr Michael Hohl.
Wilke's academic achievement is exceptional in several respects. His dissertation project "The General Issues of Private International Law - A European Concept" already took him down an unusual path. As the title suggests, it is a rare case for a German legal dissertation to be written in English. In his work, he analysed how all legal systems of the European Union deal with the general questions of so-called private international law, which determines which (national) law is to be applied to a situation, particularly in cross-border relationships.
The fact that it shows the potential and the ways for a European standardisation of these issues aroused the interest of the international specialist community.
According to experts, Dr Wilke's habilitation project on proportionality in civil proceedings will fill a gap in legal research. The Federal Constitutional Court has consistently emphasised the importance of the principle of proportionality for the entire legal system, and the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights also routinely apply this principle widely. However, there has been virtually no research to date that addresses this issue for German civil proceedings, so Dr Wilke is breaking new ground in the context of a broad-based study.
The Faculty Council of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bayreuth gave his habilitation procedure a positive interim evaluation in May 2023. Dr Wilke is seeking the venia legendi for civil law, civil procedural law, European and international private and procedural law and comparative law. If everything goes according to plan, the procedure will be completed in mid-2025.
In 2023, the University of Bayreuth awarded the prize for the advancement of women in the category "Completed doctorates" to the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science and the Faculty of Languages and Literature, which achieved the same number of points in this category (the prize money of € 10,000 is shared in this category). The prize in the category "Successful qualification for professorship" went to the Faculty of Law and Economics (€20,000). In the "Proportion of women professors" category, the prize went to the Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences and the Faculty of Life Sciences, which also achieved the same number of points in this category (the prize money of €40,000 is also shared in this category). The prize money is at the free disposal of the faculties.
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