About

Nicholas Jones joined the SMLC as a Teaching Fellow in German Studies in 2024. He previously worked as a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He received his PhD from the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies in 2023. His dissertation, ‘Revolution and the City: Marxist Anthropologies in the Interwar Realist Novel’, uncovers how Marxist authors and philosophers from interwar Germany reimagined the realist novel to resist capitalism’s stranglehold on urban space and challenge what they perceived to be the modern city’s deleterious and anti-revolutionary impact on human nature.

Research interests

Nicholas’s research focuses on intersections of art and radical politics in German literature, film, and visual culture from the twentieth and twenty-first century. His research draws on theories and resources from Marxism and Critical Theory as well as environmental studies, urban studies, and philosophical anthropology.

His current book project examines novels from interwar Germany and the GDR to uncover a twentieth-century Marxist tradition of literary realism 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 is currently preparing articles on the 2022 film Im Westen nichts Neues, Alfred Döblin’s 1924 novel Berge Meere und Giganten, and Georg Lukács’s interwar theories of literary realism. He is also working as co-editor for Only Utopias are Realistic: An Oskar Negt Reader. Previous publications include articles on Bertolt Brecht and Felix Dörmann and the 2019 Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch, The Poetic Power of Theory, which he co-edited.

Publications

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.

Qualifications

BA Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, 2012
MA Deutsche Literatur, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2015
PhD German Studies, Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, 2023