From 2005 to 2021 Oliver Zimmer was Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and Sanderson Fellow in Modern History at University College Oxford. He began his academic career in England after gaining a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1999.
his first appointment took him to the History Department of the University of Durham in the Northeast of England, where he worked until 2004. After twenty-seven years in the UK he returned to Switzerland in January 2022 to take up the post of Research Director at the Centre for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) based in Zurich.