Kai Wiegandt is Professor of Literature at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. His interests include postcolonial and world literature, migration literature, early modern literature and culture, literary anthropology and the intersections of philosophy and literature.

Kai Wiegandt studied English and German literature and philosophy at Universität Freiburg, Yale University and Freie Universität Berlin, from which he received his doctoral and professorial degrees. In 2014 he was elected member of the German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2018 he was awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship at Universität Tübingen by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and in 2022 became a DFG-funded Heisenberg professor at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. He held visiting professorships at the University of Cape Town (2011/2012) and at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (2020).

Kai Wiegandt is the author of the monographs Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2012; 2nd ed. Routledge, 2016) and J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; 2nd ed. 2021). He edited a special issue of Interventions on Subjectivities of Migration: Poetics and Genre in the Literary Imagination of Migrant Experience since 1989 (2025) and a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies on J.M. Coetzee and the Non-English Literary Traditions (2016, with Maria-Jesús Lopez). Kai Wiegandt is the editor of the volumes The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction (Winter, 2017, with Andrew James Johnston) and The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept (De Gruyter, 2020). He has published widely on postcolonial, early modern and modernist literature in journals such as Ariel, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Modern Literature, Poetica, Literature and Theology and Anglia. Selected publications can be found here.

Contact: kai.wiegandt@barenboimsaid.de