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Ritchie Neil Ninian Robertson FBA (born 1952) is a British academic who was the Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature between 2010 and 2021. He was educated at Nairn Academy in the North of Scotland and at Edinburgh University, where he took two degrees, in English and German.
- Introduction
- Teaching
- Research
I was educated at Nairn Academy in the North of Scotland and at Edinburgh University, where I took two degrees, in English and German. Having done doctoral research at Oxford, I held temporary posts at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Downing College, Cambridge, before being appointed in 1989 Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, where I staye...
Besides supervising numerous doctoral candidates, I teach a number of subjects in taught courses, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent topics of undergraduate lecture courses include German tragedy; Goethe; Heine; Thomas Mann.
My first book was Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (OUP, 1985). I remain keenly interested in the modernist period (roughly 1890-1930) and in German-Jewish literature and Austrian literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In recent years I have become more interested in eighteenth-century and comparative literature (as in my Mo...
Ritchie Robertson is interested in a wide range of authors and topics in the period from 1650 onwards, particularly the Enlightenment and Romantic periods.
Aug 9, 2021 · Ritchie Robertson, the Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford University—perhaps in keeping with his Germanophile expertise and the origins of the genre—seeks to rescue Ideengeschichte and apply its method to all the enlightened eighteenth-century ideas under examination.
- Margaret Jacob
- mjacob@history.ucla.edu
- 2021
Nov 5, 2020 · Ritchie Robertson. 4.26. 573 ratings99 reviews. This magisterial history—sure to become the definitive work on the subject—recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
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Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford. He is a Fellow of Queens College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, co-director of the Kafka research centre and of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment.
Feb 23, 2021 · Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment is a thematic survey of the major intellectual movements of the long century of 1680-1790. From the revolt against ecclesiastical power and dogma to the revolutions in America and France, Robertson paints a panorama of European history and culture.
