Rate My Professor Ned Curthoys

Ned Curthoys is an Associate Professor in the Discipline of English and Literary Studies within the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia, where he has been since joining in January 2014. He holds a BA and PhD from the University of Sydney. Prior to this appointment, Curthoys was a research fellow at the Australian National University, contributing to an ARC Discovery Project titled 'Hannah Arendt, Émigré Intellectuals, and the Ethos of World Literature' from 2006 to 2009. At UWA, he serves as shared Graduate Research Coordinator in the School of Humanities, English and Literary Studies representative on the School of Humanities Learning and Teaching Committee, and ex officio member of the School of Humanities Research and Research Training Committee. He is also Associate Editor of the journal Arendt Studies, and a member of the advisory editorial boards of Australian Humanities Review since 2010 and Limina since 2017. Curthoys reads German and French, enhancing his scholarship in related fields.

His research specializations include the Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives, Holocaust-themed literature and film, contemporary historical fiction, postcolonial literature and theory, Jewish studies, graphic novels as forms of political witnessing, narrative theory and unreliable narration, and the works of neo-humanist scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, and Edward Said. Additional interests cover German-Jewish literature and philosophy from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Enlightenment studies, and intellectual history. Key publications comprise the monograph The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation (Berghahn Books, 2013; paperback edition 2016), The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), the introduction to the special section 'Hannah Arendt and Ethical Traditions' in Arendt Studies (2024), the chapter 'Hannah Arendt' in Jewish Virtue Ethics (State University of New York Press, 2023), and 'Coming of Age in Graphic Novels Representing the Palestine/Israel Conflict' in Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict after the Second Intifada (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Awards include the FABLE Teaching Awards for Excellence in Teaching in the Lecturer category (2019) and the FABLE Research Accelerator Scheme Pilot Award for $20,000 (2018) on the project 'Ensuring the Right to have Rights.' He contributes to public discourse through media articles and events, such as discussions on Jane Austen and the Israel-Palestine conflict.