Bernhard Malkmus is designated professor of German Studies at the University of Newcastle in England, where he will, starting in January 2018, teach German and European intellectual history and literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In his essays and scholarship he explores the history of ecological imaginaries and their relation to other intellectual developments in modernity. He is currently working on two book projects: Menschwerdung: Vom Leben in einer anthropomorphen Welt deals with the epistemological and ethical implications of the Anthropocene concept; The Scandal of Nature: Imagination, Reading, and the Environment makes a case for the role of imagination in human relations to natural environments.

His publications in the environmental humanities include a special issue of New German Critique entitled Between Humanism and Posthumanism: The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities (co-edited with Heather Sullivan), an essay on Max Frisch's environmental histories in PMLA, and various book chapters on environmental ethics and aesthetics in the writings of Peter Handke, W.G. Sebald, Graham Swift, as well as in Stanley Cavell and the French and German phenomenological traditions.