Matthias Heim
Matthias Heim has been researching and teaching at the Institute of English Studies since 2007. He has taught undergraduate classes at both the Université de Neuchâtel and the Université de Lausanne. Before coming to Neuchâtel, he studied English Language and Literature, and History at the Université de Lausanne, where he completed his mémoire on “Narrative Control in Four Shakespeare Films” in Summer 2007.
Currently, Matthias is on study leave at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, to do research for his PhD both at the institute, in the archives of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Shakespeare Centre, and at other local archives. He will be back in Neuchâtel for the Spring semester 2012.
Matthias’s research focuses on the imagination of the space of war in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the changes in the representation of war since then. His PhD project looks at how modern readings of battles in Shakespeare’s plays are shaped by images of battlefields in cinema, by focusing particularly on how filmmakers have reimagined spaces of war in film adaptations of early modern plays.
He has also worked for Prof. Patrick Vincent as copy-text editor for a new edition of Helen Maria Williams’ two-volume A Tour in Switzerland (1798), and for Prof. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton with computer aided statistics on Shakespeare’s texts in the original spelling.
As a student, Matthias collaborated on several short feature films, adding practical experience to his interests in cinema and the adaptation of drama on screen. He is also privately interested in Scottish Literature, due to his exchange year studies at the Department of Scottish Literature of the University of Glasgow. In his spare time, Matthias is very anti-militaristic, and a keen photographer and hobby cook. He tries to keep up to date with the developments in computer science and graphic design.
