.png)
Departmental homepageProfessor Midgley attended a grammar school in London and studied German and French at Oxford from 1967. He completed his doctorate at Oxford in 1975 with a thesis on the German novelist Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), supervised by Professor Siegbert Prawer, and subsequently published a revised version of his thesis in German in 1980. He was appointed to the German Department in Cambridge and became a Fellow of St John's in 1979. He was Professor of German Literature and Intellectual History.
Professor Midgley taught a wide range of topics in German literature, history and thought, as well as giving regular classes in German language. At St John's he also directed studies in Modern & Medieval Languages for many years.
Over his career in Cambridge, Professor Midgley has published a wide range of articles on German literature and intellectual history. Since the publication in 2000 of his book Writing Weimar, a comprehensive study of the literature of the Weimar Republic, his publications have also included a long article on the reception of the philosopher Henri Bergson in the German speaking world (2012). Since his retirement in 2015, he has been preparing a book in English on the major works of Alfred Döblin (1878-1957).
Arnold Zweig. Zu Werk und Wandlung 1927-1948, Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum 1980.
Writing Weimar. Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933, Oxford University Press 2000.
‘Metaphysical Speculation and the Fascination of the Real. On the Connections between Döblin’s Philosophical Writings and his Major Fiction before Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (eds), Alfred Döblin. Paradigms of Modernism, Berlin: de Gruyter 2009, 7-27.
'»Schöpferische Entwicklung«. Zur Bergsonrezeption in der deutschsprachigen Welt um 1910’, Scientia poetica 16 (2012), 12-66.
