Miguel Tamen is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures, from the University of Lisbon.  He has held a number of visiting positions and fellowships, namely at the National Humanities Center, at the Stanford Humanities Center, at Stanford University, and at the University of Chicago. He was also Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon. 

He is the author of several books, among which The Matter of the Facts, Friends of Interpretable Objects, What Art is Like: In Constant Reference to the Alice Books, and Closeness. In February 2025 he was appointed founding director of the Gulbenkian Institute for Advanced Study.