Matt Hines studied Modern Languages in Oxford, Munich, and Birmingham. Before coming to Cambridge, he lived and taught in Munich for over five years. As a Teaching Associate in the German Section, he teaches on a number of undergraduate papers. In recognition of his pedagogical experience, Matt was awarded Fellowship of Advance HE in March 2024.

As a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queens’ College, Matt is working on a project entitled Aesthetics of Disgust: Political Repulsion in Contemporary French- and German-Language Novels. In this work, he uses the lens of disgust for a comparative analysis of political novels to investigate how and why authors use cultural production to intervene in political debates. The project addresses the ways in which writers provoke readers with, for example, queerphobic or sexist tropes and applies both close readings and empirical reception analysis to evaluate the efficacy of disgust as a productive political tool.

In his first book project, Writing a New Society: Aufbau in GDR Literature 1949–1962, Matt surveyed a variety of literary forms and genres from the early GDR in order to explore how intellectuals from different backgrounds interacted with, contested, and influenced political discourse. Authors ranged from familiar figures like Sarah Kirsch, Heinar Kipphardt, Inge and Heiner Müller, and Eduard Claudius, to lesser-known or unpublished writers, including refugees and ‘prison poets’. This study is under contract with Brill.

Matt is committed to inclusivity and accessibility in Modern Languages as a whole. He is the joint Postgraduate and Early-Career Representative for the Association for German Studies, and an organising member of the collective EGS – Towards an Equitable German Studies, which runs a blog and online bibliography, and the Outreach Coordinator in the German Section. In this role, Matt regularly visits schools and recently organised, for example, the Cambridge Undergraduate Conference in German Studies.

Finally, Matt is Director of the Language Programme at the Sommerschule Wust, an English-language summer school for all ages in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. A number of undergraduates from Cambridge (and elsewhere in the UK, as well as the USA) have been travelling to Wust in the summer for thirty years to teach. Matt is happy to talk to current undergraduates in German who are interested in this paid teaching opportunity.