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K-State Today

February 28, 2018

Talk by Tim Mehigan, Oz to Oz Fulbright scholar, on Thursday, March 1

Submitted by Karin Westman

Tim Mehigan

Tim Mehigan, 2017-2018 Fulbright senior scholar, will visit Kansas State University March 1-2 as part of the university's Oz to Oz program.

Mehigan is professor of German and deputy director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia. He will offer a talk on "J.M. Coetzee in Chicago: Ethics as the problem of getting 'to the far territory, where we want to be'" at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 1, in the Hale Library's Hemisphere Room. The talk is free and open to the public.

Mehigan will discuss how Coetzee's teaching and supervision duties with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago influenced Coetzee's literary development.

During his visit, Mehigan will meet with faculty and students in the departments of English and modern languages.

Mehigan has published widely on German literature and thought since 1780. Of particular note is his work on Heinrich von Kleist and Robert Musil. In 2011, he published with de Gruyter (Berlin) the first translation of K.L. Reinhold's treatise on representation — "Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation" — a difficult work of Kantian exegesis from 1789 that had long defied attempts to render it into English. In the same year his study "Heinrich von Kleist: Writing After Kant" appeared.

Mehigan has also produced important work on the Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, the subject of his Fulbright project and his public talk. The edited volume "The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee" is due out this month with Camden House. His well-received "Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee" was published, also with Camden House, in 2011.

In 2013, Mehigan received the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2003.

Mehigan earned his bachelor's degree and doctorate from the University of Sydney, with additional doctoral research at the University of Freiburg.

The Oz to Oz program was established to grow a network of faculty between Kansas State University and Australian universities. As part of the program, K-State hosts visiting faculty from Australian universities and sends faculty from K-State to Australia. Visiting Fulbright scholars present a seminar and connect with host faculty members.