Dr. Matthew Bell

Matthew Bell studied Ancient Greek, Latin and German at Balliol College, Oxford, in the mid-1980s. Following a year at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Munich, he returned to Oxford to study for his PhD under Prof. T. J. Reed. The PhD thesis was published in revised form by OUP under the title: Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants (1995). After holding Junior Research Fellowships at The Queen's College and Balliol College, Matthew moved to King's College London as lecturer in German. In 2002, with Prof. David Ricks, he set up the Comparative Literature Programme at King's. In 2007 he was appointed Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's.

Matthew has published widely on a diverse range of topics in German and European literature and intellectual history and book history. His most recent project is an intellectual biography of Goethe to be published in 2025 by Princeton University Press.