Professor of German's lifetime achievements recognised by major award

W. Daniel Wilson has been awarded a prestigious prize in recognition of his achievements in research and teaching.

The professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London has received the Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Supported by the German Foreign Office and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the award carries a prize of 60,000 Euros. It also entails an invitation to collaborate with other scholars at the University of Göttingen and the Foundation for Weimar Classicism.

Professor Wilson's research focuses on literature, culture and society of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany. He is currently researching a book on the politics of the Goethe Society, Germany’s most important literary society, in the Weimar Republic and 'Third Reich'.

Professor Gerhard Lauer of the University of Göttingen, who nominated Professor Wilson for the prize, writes: “Daniel Wilson has taught us a critical view of J. W. von Goethe and his legacy. His books have subjected the educated elites’ view of German literature to keen critique and triggered extensive debates on the significance of Weimar Classicism.”

Professor Wilson’s work has been discussed in the cultural pages of Germany’s leading newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as on television and radio.

Professor Wilson said: “I feel delighted and honoured to receive this prize and look forward to working with leading German scholars on exciting projects relating to the legacy of Goethe and Weimar Classicism in the twentieth century.”