Professor Nicholas Boyle FBA

Professor Nicholas Boyle is an Emeritus Fellow at Magdalene.

Professor Boyle was elected to the Schröder Professorship of German in 2006. Prior to this, he served as Professor of German Literary and Intellectual History. He has been teaching German at Cambridge since his time as a student. His research interests focus on German literature and thought from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on Goethe and the relationship between religion and literature.

Professor Boyle was the Principal Investigator of the research project The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, a major international, cross-disciplinary network examining the legacy of German Idealism. The project culminated in a four-volume work published by Cambridge University Press in November 2013, which assessed the impact of this philosophical movement on science, religion, and culture.

Research Interests

Professor Boyle has published two volumes of his prizewinning biography, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, and is currently working on the third and, he hopes, final volume. The biography has been translated into German, and in 2000, Professor Boyle was awarded the Goethe Medal by the Goethe-Institut. In 2001, he was elected to the British Academy.

His wide-ranging interests in European literature, philosophy, theology, and politics are reflected in his essay collection Who Are We Now? (1998) and in Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (2005). Professor Boyle has also edited various volumes and a CD-ROM of Goethe's works, alongside publishing 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, with additional material not included in the English edition available on his website. In 2010, he published How to Survive the Next World Crisis (Continuum Books), a brief study of the current political and economic landscape.