Professor Théophil Spoerri was professor of Italian and French literature at the University of Zurich for more than thirty years. He served as Rector of the University from 1948 until 1950. His work on Dante won him the Gold Medal of the city of Florence and the award of ‘Commendatore’ of the Italian Order of Merit. He was also one of the pioneers in Switzerland of what in the years before the Second World War was called the Oxford Group, and then Moral Re-Armament. He died in December 1974 during a winter conference in the Caux conference centre.

Theophil Spoerri was the son of a Methodist Preacher called Jakob Gottlieb Spoerri and of his wife Maria Eugenie Thiele/Spoerri.

Spoerri studied at Zürich, Siena and Paris. He obtained his doctorate at Bern in 1916. Between 1922 and 1956 he was an Associate Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Zurich where his students included the future novelist Max Frisch. In respect of university administration he was made Dean in 1932, and university Rector between 1948 and 1950. 

Spoerri's religious upbringing gave him a powerful religious, social and political commitment. In 1940 he joined with others to form an anti-Nazi organisation called the Gotthard League, becoming its first president. He was also a member of the Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft (New Helvetic Society).

Dynamic out of Silence was for a many years the first introduction by an international scholar to Frank Buchman, the remarkable American initiator of Moral Re-Armament (now known by the name Initiatives of Change).

His papers are archived at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, Zürich, archives: https://onlinearchives.ethz.ch/archive/tree/home