Professor Henk de Berg

I am currently External Examiner for German at Nottingham, and for Dutch at Cambridge. I have been Internal or External Examiner for 15 PhD theses and 1 MPhil thesis.

I have acted as a referee for a variety of publishers (including Cambridge UP, Oxford UP, and Routledge) and international journals. I am on the editorial boards of the “Publications of the English Goethe Society” and “Convivium”.

Among the international conferences and colloquia I have organised are “Tzvetan Todorov” (2015; with Karine Zbinden) and “Constructing Europe(s): The Cultural Borders of Western and Eastern Europe Past, Present, and Future” (2017; with Evgeny Dobrenko).

Together with Prof Evgeny Dobrenko in Russian & Slavonic Studies and Prof Robert Stern in Philosophy, I organise the University of Sheffield’s Prokhorov Lectures, which are delivered by world-leading scholars and public intellectuals. Topics range from philosophy and literature to society and migration. The lectures focusing on religion take place in Sheffield Cathedral and are organised in collaboration with the Cathedral’s Dean and its Canon Misssioner.

I have conducted a number of YouTube interviews, mostly in the context of the Prokhorov Centre’s activities. 

Interview with Karen Armstrong, religious commentator

--on "A History of God", "The Case for God", and "Sacred Nature"

Interview with Miranda (MJ) Carter, biographer and novelist

--on art historian and spy Anthony Blunt

--on historical fiction

Interview with David Engels, Classical historian

--on the future of the European Union 1

--on the future of the European Union 2

Interview with Giles Fraser, Anglican priest and broadcaster

--on Nietzsche, Kundera, the Church, and Occupy London

Interview with John Gray, philosopher

--on the varieties of atheism

--on political populism

Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, literary and cultural theorist

--on Gumbrecht’s life and work, Stimmung, and Sartre’s “La Nausée”

Interview with John Lanchester, novelist and journalist

--on money, markets, and morals

Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch (theologian) & Peter Bradley (Dean of Sheffield Cathedral)

--on the existence of God

--on the Church, gay marriage, and women priests

--on faith, violence, and terrorism

Interview with Alister McGrath, theologian and molecular biophysicist

--on the existence of God and Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion”

Interview with Audrey Niffenegger, author and visual artist

--on “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and its sequel 1

--on “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and its sequel 2

Interview with Peter Pomerantsev, writer and expert on propaganda strategies

--on "This Is Not Propaganda", disinformation, and fake news

Interview with Nina Power, feminist philosopher

--on “One-Dimensional Woman”

--on Feuerbach, Sartre, and the collective political subject

Interview with T. J. Reed, President of the English Goethe Society

--on Goethe and the Enlightenment

Interview with Lionel Shriver, novelist and journalist

--on identity politics

--on literature, freedom of speech, and cultural appropriation

Interview with Mona Siddiqui, Islamic theologian

--on “My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey”

--on the Quran, Mohammed, hadith, and Sunni and Shia

Interview (in French) with Tzvetan Todorov, literary and cultural theorist

--on his life and work

See also my eulogy (in French), “Todorov, spectateur engagé”

Interview with Marina Warner, author and literary and cultural theorist

--on myth

--on fairy tales

--on “The Leto Bundle”

--on narrative and the refugee crisis

Interview with Larry Wolff, intellectual historian

--on child abuse in Freud’s Vienna, J. M. Masson’s “The Assault on Truth”

--on “Inventing Eastern Europe”, Orientalism, Casanova, and Voltaire