Professor Matthew Bell FBA

Summary

Matthew Bell was born and grew up in Welwyn Garden City. He studied Classics and Modern Languages (Ancient Greek, Latin and German) at Oxford and wrote his doctorate on Goethe. He held junior research fellowships at Queen’s and Balliol colleges, Oxford. He has taught at King’s College London since 1993.

In 2002 he founded the Comparative Literature programme at King’s and in 2007 became Professor of German and Comparative Literature. He has served as treasurer and honorary secretary of the English Goethe Society and edited the Publications of the English Goethe Society between 2005 and 2012.

His teaching and research cover a range of topics in the literary and intellectual history of Europe from antiquity to the present day, with a focus on Germany c. 1750-1830. His work has discovered new instances of modern reception of the classics and Shakespeare, constructed new links between literature and intellectual history, and developed new ways of understanding the history of the human sciences.

He has written two monographs each on his two main specialisms: the writings and thought of Goethe, and the history and philosophy of psychological theory and the affective disorders.

The first monograph on Goethe was a study of Goethe’s relations to Enlightenment anthropological theory (Goethe’s Naturalistic Anthropology, OUP 1994).

His latest monograph is a large-scale intellectual biography (Goethe: A Life in Ideas, Princeton 2025), which examines the paradox of Goethe’s political conservatism and literary liberality. It was chosen as a 'New Statesman' book of the year for 2025.

Between these two studies of Goethe, he published a monograph on the emergence of the traditions of empirical and depth psychology in Germany between 1700 and 1840 ('The German Tradition of Psychology', CUP 2005) and a philosophical history of melancholia from antiquity to 1800 ('Melancholia: The Western Malady', CUP 2015).