Dr Peter Thompson
Reader in German
email : p.thompson@sheffield.ac.uk
I have been teaching at the University of Sheffield since 1990, when I was appointed to build up the provision of politics and history options within the Department. My background is a somewhat unusual one: I left school at 16, joined the army for 5 years and then worked as a lorry driver, before commencing undergraduate study as a mature student in 1983 at Portsmouth Polytechnic. My interests have always been in the post-war history of the GDR and German unification, but my main area of research at present is in the field of Ernst Bloch studies, encompassing not only his period in the GDR from 1949 to 1961 - when he was Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig University and centrally involved in oppositional Marxist activities of the Harich-Gruppe of the mid 1950s – but also in the philosophical impact of his theories of Hope, Utopia and his view of the central role of faith in social transformation. I have also now established The Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at Sheffield.
Since 1990 I have published on the history of ideas, political developments in the GDR and post-unification Germany, Brecht, ecology and philosophy, and the PDS/Linke. In 2005 I published The Crisis of the German Left, which deals with the history of Stalinism in the workers´ movement and its continuing influence on the post-unification Left. I am also one of the founding editors of the journal DEBATTE, which has been running since 1993 and deals with German and wider Central European Affairs.
Projects underway include a monograph on the `Ernst Bloch and Transcendental Materialism´ - an examination of the transcendence without the transcendental which Bloch maintains is inherent in the principle of hope and human progress; a translation of Bloch's 1921 book Thomas Muenzer als Theologe der Revolution; a co-edited book with Creston Davis on Islam and Modernity which will include a translation of Bloch's Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke.
Duke University Press have agreed to publish the volume "Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Crisis of Modernity" in their SIC series. I shall be co-editing this with Slavoj Zizek. Contributors will include Slavoj Zizek, Juergen Moltmann, Jan Robert Bloch, Roland Boer, Tom Nairn, Philip Goodchild and others.
In addition I am a media commentator on German affairs, having appeared in several Radio 4 programmes and a Channel 4 documentary on British attitudes to the Third Reich. I have also published a Face to Faith column in the Guardian on Ernst Bloch and Atheism and am now a regular columnist for the Guardian's CiF Belief website. A commissioned 3,000 word article on the world since 1989 will also appear in the Church Times on 18th December as a sort of reverse Thoght for the Day, in which an atheist reflects on issues of the day in a Christian forum.
In 2008 I was given a three-year British Academy Research Development Award (BARDA) totalling £107,000, to work on a project entitled Ernst Bloch and the Return of Religion. The funds have been used to support the work of the Centre and to enable me to take sabbatical leave in order to conduct research in Berlin and Ludwigshafen and work on my monograph and edited volume.
List of Publications, Papers and Conference Contributions