Biography
Dr Nicholas Jones joined St. Hilda’s College as a Career Development Fellow in German in 2025. He teaches German literature and film from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries as well as German language.
He received his PhD from the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies in 2023, having previously completed his BA at the University of Durham and his MA at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He has since held posts as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick and a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His research focuses on intersections of art and radical politics in German literature, film and visual culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He draws on theories and resources from Marxism and Critical Theory as well as environmental studies, urban studies and philosophical anthropology.
Nicholas is finalising the manuscript for his first monograph, The Nature of the City: Literary Realism and the Interwar Critique of Ecological Alienation, which examines an interwar Marxist tradition of literary realism in Germany that sought to expose and combat humanity’s alienation from nature under capitalism. By mapping this episode of literary-philosophical history, the monograph also intervenes into contemporary debates about the role of art in our era of ecological collapse.
Nicholas has previously published articles on Bertolt Brecht and Felix Dörmann, and he co-edited the 2019 Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch, The Poetic Power of Theory. He is currently completing articles on the 2022 film Im Westen nichts Neues and Alfred Döblin’s 1924 novel Berge Meere und Giganten, and he is working as co-editor for Only Utopias are Realistic: An Oskar Negt Reader.
Journal articles and book chapters
“Poetry After (Post-)Truth: Aesthetic Resistance to the Politics of Misinformation in Bertolt Brecht’s Svendborger Gedichte.” The Brecht Yearbook 47 (2022): 63-80.
“‘Ist auch dein Herbst gekommen, Europa?’ Constellations of Time and Space in the Novels of Felix Dörmann.” Co-authored with Christoph Schmitz. Journal for Austrian Studies 54.2 (2021): 119-140.
Co-edited volumes
Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 6: The Poetic Power of Theory. Eds. R. Langston, L. A. Adelson, N. D. Jones, L. Wilms. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019.
Positions
- Career Development Fellow in German
Subjects
- German
