Peter Thompson

Peter Thompson is a Reader in German at the University of Sheffield German Department. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, writing on religion and philosophy and he has made a programme for BBC Radio 3 on the German writer Georg Büchner. He is also the director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, has recently published a short e-book on Marx and is co-editor, with Slavoj Žižek of The Privatization of Hope with Duke University Press, which will appear in December 2013. His career is a slightly unorthodox one in that he left school at 16 and then spent five years in the Army as a musician and two years as a lorry driver before beginning his studies in German as a mature student at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1983. It has been all downhill from there.