Tim Mehigan

Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (elected 2003) and former President of the German Studies Association of Australia (2003-2007). He was Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich for two years in 1994 and 1995. In 2013 he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. In 2017 he was awarded the Fulbright Senior Scholarship.

From 2013 to 2022 Tim has held a guest appointment as Humboldt Prize Winner at the University of Bonn, Germany. In 2017-2018 he was Fulbright Research Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, USA. Previous appointments include Honorary Professor in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland in 2011-2012.

Tim’s work is focused on two key periods in German and European literary and intellectual history: on the one hand, the literature and philosophy of the time of Goethe and Kant, which is to say, the late 18th and early 19th century; on the other hand, the literature and philosophy of Austrian modernism in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Beyond such a focus, Tim is vitally interested in the connections that flow between literature and philosophy and has explored these in relation to writers such as Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and Robert Musil (1880-1942) and topic areas such as the deployment of space in literature.

Tim has also recently edited two collections devoted to assessing the work of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2011; Camden House, 2018) and published, with B. Empson, the first English translation of K.L. Reinhold’s major work of philosophy Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Walter de Gruyter, 2011). Most recently, with Antonino Falduto (Ferrara), he has edited The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller (Palgrave/Macmillan 2022).