Jürgen Barkhoff is Professor of German (1776) at the Department of Germanic Studies and Head of School of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. His main research areas are literature and medicine, science and psychology around 1800, questions of identity in the German speaking world and Europe as reflected in literature and culture and contemporary Swiss literature. He is currently convener of the university wide research theme 'Identities in Transformation'. From 2002-2005 he was Director of the Centre for European Studies, from 2007-2011 Registrar of the University, from 2006-2011 Chair of the Culture, Arts and Humanities Task Force of the Coimbra Group. From 2012-2015 he was Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. He is currently Vice-Chair of the Executive Board of the Coimbra Group of European Universities.

My current reserach spans four different areas: - Anthropolgy and literature around 1800, literature and the body, the interface between medicine, psychology and science with literature in the Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism and Romanticism; - concepts of nature and representations of the man-nature relationship in fiction, the aesthetics of nature and its interface with environmentalism, ecocritical German writing; - questions of identity in the German speaking world and in Europe - contemporary literature of German speaking Switzerland