Nicholas Jones

Teaching Assistant Professor of German

Education

Ph.D. German Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, 2023

Intellectual Biography

Nicholas Jones works on German literary modernism and film in the twentieth century. He received his Ph.D. from the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies in 2023 with a dissertation that examines interwar realist novels by Alfred Döblin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Arnold Zweig using Marxism, philosophical anthropology, and architecture and urban planning. The dissertation illustrates how interwar socialist authors deployed the realist novel as a shelter from and a weapon against the perils of urban capitalism. It argues that this poetic politics was rooted in countervailing Marxist theories of human nature and urban space. Nicholas has recently published articles on the poetry of Bertolt Brecht and the novels of Felix Dörmann, and he is co-editor of the 2019 Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. He is currently preparing articles for publication on Arnold Zweig’s novella Pont und Anna and Leonhard Frank’s novella collection Der Mensch ist gut, and he is working as co-editor and translator for Only Utopias are Realistic: An Oskar Negt Reader.

Recent Publications

“Poetry After (Post-)Truth: Aesthetic Resistance to the Politics of Misinformation in Bertolt Brecht’s Svendborger Gedichte.” The Brecht Yearbook (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.

Courses Taught

GERM 203: Intermediate German I

GERM 301: Advanced Applied German: Life, Work, Fun

GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature

GSLL 259: Ideology and Aesthetics: Marxism and Literature