Miguel Tamen

Miguel Tamen (born 1960) is a Portuguese literary theorist, philosopher, essayist, and academic. He has written a number of books including Friends of Interpretable Objects (2004) and Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies (1993). Tamen has taught at the University of Lisbon since 1990. He co-founded the university's program in literary theory. He was elected the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the university for 2017-2019.^[1]

Tamen obtained his bachelor of arts from the University of Lisbon and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota (1989).

Tamen has taught at the University of Lisbon since 1990. He co-founded the university's program in literary theory with António M. Feijó, in 1991.^[2] He was a full professor (professor catedrático) in 2018 when he was elected Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon,^[1] a role in which he served until 2024.

He has also served as visiting professor at several international universities, including Stanford University and the University of Chicago (2000–2014), and was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center^[3] and the National Humanities Center.^[4] He was a weekly columnist for the Portuguese newspaper Observador between 2014 and 2017, and again since 2023.^[5]

Since February 2025, he has been Director of the Gulbenkian Institute for Advanced Study^[6] at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.^[7]

Tamen has written a number of books. His books have been published in both Portuguese and English. They include:

• Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies State University of New York Press (1993) ISBN 978-0791415047
• The Matter of the Facts: On Invention and Interpretation. Stanford University Press (2002) ISBN 9780804734325
• Friends of Interpretable Objects. Harvard University Press. (2004) ISBN 9780674013681
• What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books. Harvard University Press. (2012) ISBN 9780674067066
• Closeness. Juxta Press (2021) ISBN 9788894497281
• Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork with Brett Bourbon. Routledge (2025) ISBN 9781032457284

Of his book What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books, Michael R. Spicher in the peer-reviewed journal, Review of Metaphysics, highlighted the book’s unconventional argumentative style and its contribution to debates on the nature of art.^[8] Of Tamen, Peter Lamarque, writing in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, said as a philosopher, Tamen "reveal[s] the extraordinary in the ordinary, the mysterious in the mundane, making the familiar unfamiliar, and all in a style entirely his own.^[9]

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Poole described Friends of Interpretable Objects as “suavely Wittgensteinian and insatiably curious”.^[10]

In Portuguese media, iOnline characterized his essays as marked by intellectual rigor and stylistic clarity,^[11] while Público discussed his contributions to debates on the Portuguese literary canon.^[12]