Professor Nicholas Boyle
College:
Magdalene College
Positions:
Schröder Professor of German
Department of German and Dutch
Postal Address:
Magdalene College
Magdalene Street
CAMBRIDGE CB3 0AG
Email:
nb215@cam.ac.uk
Phone:
(+44) (0)1223 332137
Fax
(+44) (0)1223 335062
Nicholas Boyle was elected to the Schröder Professorship*
of German in 2006. Before that he was Professor of German Literary and
Intellectual History, and he has taught German in Cambridge since he was a student. He has a particular interest in German literature and thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially in Goethe, and in the relation between religion and literature. He has so far published two volumes of his prizewinning biography,
Goethe: the Poet and the Age and is currently working on the third and (he hopes) last. The biography has been translated into German and in 2000 Professor Boyle was awarded the Goethe Medal of the Goethe-Institut. In 2001 he was elected to the British Academy. His wide interests in European literature, philosophy, theology, and politics are reflected in his book of essays,
Who Are We Now? published in 1998, and in
Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature, published in 2005. He has also edited various volumes and a CD-ROM of Goethe's works, and has published a study of
Faust Part One and numerous articles on French and German literature. His
German Literature. A Very Short
Introduction was published in 2008, and
additional material not included in the English edition of this can be read on this site.
2014 - How to Survive the Next World Crisis (Continuum Books), a brief study of the current political and economic moment in history was published in 2010.
Professor Boyle is currently the Principal Investigator on the research project
"The Impact of Idealism: the legacy of post-Kantian German thought", a major international cross-disciplinary network investigating the legacy of German Idealism.
*The text of Professor Boyle's inaugural lecture can be read
here.
