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Professor Peter H Morgan

BA (Hons), MA, Ph.D. (Monash)
Director, European Studies Program
Room 535, Brennan MacCallum Building A18

+61 2 9036 5480

After studying German at Monash University, Melbourne, and at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, I worked as a lecturer in German at Monash University and subsequently as Executive Director of the Victorian Ethnic Communities’ Council in Melbourne. I completed my Ph.D. on Goethe’s works of the 1790s, and was offered a lectureship in German at the University of Western Australia. Shortly after the ‘Fall of the Wall’ in the early 90s I spent a year on an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship, studying contemporary German literature and national identity at the Technische Universität in Berlin. On returning to Perth I established the European Studies program at UWA in 1994. This was UWA’s first area studies and intellectual history program, outlining the lineaments of contemporary Europe and tracing the origins and development of European identity.

I have written and published widely in my home discipline of German studies as well as in comparative literary studies, socio-historical, political and cultural studies, and the pedagogy of European Studies. In 2003 I received an ARC Large Grant to complete a critical study and biography of the Albanian writer and dissident, Ismail Kadare, and in 2004 received a Camargo Foundation grant investigating Ismail Kadare’s French connections. In 2009 I received a further ARC Large Grant to complete the critical biography of Kadare entitled Kadare after Communism: 1990-2010. Earlier publications include a book-length study of Goethe’s work of the 1790s, in particular the influence of revolutionary politics on his writing and thinking, and numerous articles on German and European literature in journals such as Zeitschrift für Germanistik, German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, The Modern Language Review, East European Politics and Society, Monatshefte, Journal of European Studies, World Literature Today.

I have a long history of service as discipline head and on faculty and university committees at the University of Western Australia and have interacted widely with the wider Perth community as an academic representative of the University. I have received several Faculty Distinguished Teaching Awards (1988, 2007) and citations (1995-98), and was promoted to Winthrop Professor of German at UWA in 2009. In 2010 I took up the Foundation Chair of European Studies at the University of Sydney. I am currently working on a study of homosexual protagonists in the European modernist novel. As Director of the European Studies program in which I encourage Australian students to broaden their horizons through the study of languages and cultures.

Research areas

  • Dictatorship and Literature: Ismail Kadare
  • Masculinity and Homosexual Identity in European Modernism
  • Thomas Mann’s late work

Current projects

  • Ismail Kadare after Communism, 1990-2010
  • Homosexual Masculinity and the European Modernist Novel

Selected publications

Books
  • Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957-1990. London, Oxford: Legenda, 2009.
  • The Critical Idyll: Traditional Values and the French Revolution in Goethe’s ‘Hermann und Dorothea.’ Columbia (SC): Camden House, 1990. pp. 183 pp.
Articles
  • “Sacrifice, Modernité et Perte dans Le pont aux trois arches de Kadaré.” Colloque Kadaré, ed. Véronique Gély and Arianne Eissen. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010. (In press.)
  • “Kadare and ‘inner exile’ Writing under Socialism. Meesha Nehru & Sara Jones, eds. Nottingham: CCC Press, 2010.
  • “Kadare after Communism: Albania, the Balkans, and Europe in the Post-1990 Work of Ismail Kadare.” Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imaginary. Christian Moraru and Stephen Fischer-Galati, eds. East European Monographs. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.)
  • “'Your Story is Now My Story': The Ethics of Narration in Grass and Sebald.” Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, Vol. 101, no. 2 (2009): 86-106.
  • “Literature and National Redemption in W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction.” Gerhard Fischer, ed. W.G. Sebald: Schreiben ex patria / Expatriate Writing. New York: Rodopi, 2009. Pp. 213-132.
  • “The Failure to Invent the Truth”: W.G. Sebald’s Critique of West German Literature. Limbus: Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 1 (2008): 35-52.
  • ‘Ismail Kadare’s The Shadow: Literature, Dissidence and Albanian Identity.” East European Politics and Society 22 (2008): 402-424.
  • “Consequences of Secondary Literature Study at University Level.” Directions in Education-Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL) Vol. 16, no. 14, 3 Aug, 2007. (ISSN: 1038-1368).
  • “‘Die Heimat meiner Seele’: The Significance of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina for Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus.” Christine Weller, Robert Savage, Christine Magerski, eds. Moderne Begreifen: Zur Paradoxie eines Sozio-Ästhetischen Deutungsmusters. Wiesbaden: DUV Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 2007.
  • “Ismail Kadare: Modern Homer or Albanian Dissident?” World Literature Today vol. 80, no. 5 (September-October 2006) 7-11.
  • “The Sign Of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald’s Prose-Narratives.” German Life & Letters 58 (2005): 76-92.
  • “The Spirit of the Place: Idyll as ‘Imagined Community’ in Goethe’s Werther.” AUMLA (Special Issue) February 2003. 42-55.
  • “Ancient Names ... Marked by Fate: Ethnicity and the ‘Man without Qualities’ in Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams.” The European Legacy 7 (2002): 45-60. Reprinted in: Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 190, eds. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004):141-151.
  • “Between Albanian Identity and Imperial Politics: Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams.” The Modern Language Review 97 (2002): 365-379. Reprinted in: [[i||Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 190, eds. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004):152-162.
  • “Europe from Down Under: A Case-Study in the Development of European Studies Programs Outside Europe.” Journal of European Studies 29 (1999): 79-95.
  • “European Studies,” chapter 12 of Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia into the 21st Century: The Strategic Disciplinary Review on Resarch and Research Training in the Humanities. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1998. Vol. 2, Pp. 117-126.
  • “'A Presence called Germany’: Personal History in the Construction of National Identity by Post-War German Intellectuals: Three Case Studies.” Journal of European Studies 26 (1996): 239-266.
  • “‘Something Greater, an Emotion More Transcendent’: Violence and the Reconstruction of Group Identity in Enzensberger’s Civil War.” Gerhard Fischer, ed. Debating Enzensberger: ‘Great Migration’ and ‘Civil War.’ Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1996, pp. 103-116.
  • “The Sins of the Fathers: A Reappraisal of the Controversy about Peter Schneider’s Vati.” German Life & Letters 47 (1994): 104-133.
  • “Republicanism, Identity and the New European Order: Georg Forster’s Letters from Mainz and Paris, 1792-1793.” Journal of European Studies 22 (1992): 71-100. (By invitation of the editor, Prof. John Flower, Univ. of Exeter, for ‘Europe 1992’ edition.)
  • “Aufklärung, Revolution und Nationalgefühl: Der Topos des Jakobiners und die Frage deutscher Identität in Goethes Hermann und Dorothea.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik N.S. 3 (1991): 533-541.
  • “The Artist Within and Beyond Language: Art and History in Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives. Eds. David Roberts, and Philip Thomson (New York, Oxford, Munich: Berg, 1990) 127-44.
  • “Critical Enlightenment and the Intelligentsia after 1792: Die Horen, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, and the “Xenienstreit.” Antipodische Aufklärungen/Antipodean Enlightenments. Ed. Walter Veit. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987. Pp. 299-309.
  • “Parody and Middle-Class Identity. The Function of Idyll in Goethe and Voß.” Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody. Eds. P. Petr, D. Roberts, P. Thomson. Frankfurt: Lang, 1985. Pp. 219-227.
  • “The Fairy-Tale as Radical Perspective: Enlightenment as Barrier and Bridge to Civic Values in Goethe’s “Das Märchen.” Orbis Litterarum, 40 (1985): 222-243.

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching
  • European Studies undergraduate and postgraduate units
    Supervision
Supervision
  • MA and Ph.D. Supervision in German and European Studies

Conference activity

  • “The Failure of Homosexual Militarism in Max René Hesse’s Partenau.” Australian German Studies Association of Australia 3rd International Conference, University of Western Australia, Perth, November 18-20, 2009.
  • “Ismail Kadare’s Critique of Albanian Socialism.” Writing under Socialism Past and Present: A Comparative Approach, 11-12 July 2008, University of Nottingham.
  • “Sacrifice, Modernité et Perte dans Le pont aux trois arches de Kadaré.” Colloque Ismaïl Kadaré, Paris, Université de Paris-Nanterre, May 29-31, 2008. Université de Paris 10-Nanterre.
  • “Your Story is Now My Story”: The Ethics of Narration in Grass and Sebald.” Erinnerungskrisen / Memory Crises: German Studies Association of Australia. Melbourne University, Victoria, 26th - 29th September 2007.
  • “Literature and National Redemption in W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur.” W.G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing. Goethe-Institut Sydney and University of New South Wales, July 20-23 2006.
  • Alexander von Humboldt Biennial Conference: Australasia, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, September 2005.
  • “German Studies in Australia: Changing Patterns in Teaching and Research,” Alexander von Humboldt Biennial Conference: Australasia, University of Auckland, New Zealand, January 2004.
  • “Ismail Kadare: Stalinism, Modernization, Patriotism and Literature,” Australian European Historians Association, University of Queensland, July 2003.
  • “Die Heimat meiner Seele”: Pfitzner’s Palestrina and the Conflicting Demands of Ethics and Aesthetics in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, German Studies Association of Australia, Sydney University/Goethe Institute, July 2003.
  • “Under the Sign of Saturn: W.G. Sebald’s Melancholy Narratives” AULLA, University of Adelaide, February 4-9, 2001.

Other professional contributions

University and Community
  • Ministerial Working Party on the Teaching of Languages other than English in Secondary Schools (LOTE) – Perth, WA
  • NLLIA (National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia), Sub-Committee on Cross-Accreditation for Language-Courses among WA Universities.
  • SEA (Secondary Education Authority, WA) German Syllabus Committee
  • Chief Examiner, TEE German Examinining Board, WA
  • Goethe Institute, Munich, Accredited Examiner.
  • Head of Department, German, UWA, 1994-2000
  • Head, School of European Languages and Studies, UWA, 1999-2004
  • Acting Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Humanities and the Social Sciences, 2006
Professional journal editorial boards
  • EFLaCS: Essays in French Literature and Cultural Studies
  • Transpositionen - Studien zur deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Kultur
  • Limbus
  • Advisory Board, Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Germanistik (GIG, Society for Intercultural German Studies)
  • ANZJES: Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies
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