Barry Nisbet was Professor of Modern Languages (German) at the University of Cambridge from 1982 to 2007. He was previously Reader in German at the University of Bristol and Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. His speciality is the literature and thought of eighteenth-century Germany, and its relation to the European Enlightenment. He has written books on Herder and Goethe, edited six other books and published some fifty articles and over a hundred reviews on related topics. At different times, he has served as General Editor and Germanic Editor of Modern Language Review, and he is joint General Editor, with Claude Rawson of Yale University, of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the last of whose nine volumes appeared in 2013. He has also translated four volumes of works by Kant and Hegel for Cambridge University Press. In 1998, he was awarded a Humboldt Prize for research on Lessing, of whom he wrote a critical biography which was published by Oxford University Press and reviewed by the TLS.