Dr Nicola Thomas

Lecturer in German Studies

Research Overview

I am interested in cultural ways of knowing space, time and the environment, across languages. My current research covers two main areas.

First, I am interested in questions of time and the environment. This emerged from my work on 'Anthropocene Lateness' in the poetry of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker. In 2019, I cofounded the British Academy-funded Anthropocene Times research network with Dr Blake Ewing (University of Nottingham), and ran a small research project on how we use creativity to navigate time in the Anthropocene. In 2023-26, Dr Ewing and I are leading a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary research project on 'Wetland Times', comparing time language and concepts across three global wetland landscapes.

My previous research focused on English and German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Paul Celan, J. H. Prynne, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Edwin Morgan and Friederike Mayröcker. My first monograph, Space, Place and Poetry in English and German, 1960-1975 (Palgrave, 2018), looked at engagements with place and landscape in the work of a range of writers working in the twentieth-century, at a moment of rapid transformation in thinking about space and spatiality. I argued that writers in these two quite different traditions were working through similar issues of disrupted spatiality and, in so doing, were also radically reimagining the European lyric in ways that only a comparative reading could bring properly into focus.

Together with Jana Maria Weiss and Alexander Kappe, I am a co-editor of the landmark anthology The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman, 2025) - the first major anthology of contemporary German-language poetry in English for more than 40 years, bringing together more than hundred poems by more than sixty poets and translators. This project was awarded an English PEN prize and is supported by the German Translators' Fund.

Additional Information

I welcome PhD proposals for German-language or comparative cultural or literary projects, especially those with a focus on ecocriticism and the (multilingual) environmental humanities; contemporary German-language and European Anglophone literature, particularly poetry; and ecocritical theory and poetics.

Current Teaching

GERM100/101 German in Context

GERM233 Shaping Contemporary German-Speaking Europe: Moments and Movements

DELC401 Research Skills for Postgraduates

DELC100 Part I Language Studies

Research Grants

2024: Co-I on Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Place and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC (British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Grants)

2023: British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary funding (Wetland Times) and Knowledge Frontiers Follow-on Funding (Anthropocene (A)synchronicities).

2022: FASS Research Funding to support Wetland Times project development (with Dr Blake Ewing, Hertford College, Oxford)

2021: British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Seed Funding: 'Grounding Value in the Anthropocene'

2021: British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Seed Funding: 'Anthropocene Times'

2019: University of Oxford Faculty Research Funding (for archival visits)

2016: University of Nottingham Research Priority Area: Languages, Text and Societies (to co-found the journal LTS)

2015: University of Nottingham Cascade Funding (to support 'Words for Walls' public engagement project)

2012-13: AHRC PhD funding (maintence grant and fees)

2011-12: AHRC Postgraduate MA Funding (maintance grant and fees)

Selected Publications

Space, Place and Poetry in English and German 1960-1975
Thomas, N. 31/12/2018 New York : Palgrave Macmillan. 208 p. ISBN: 9783030079635, 9783319902111. Electronic ISBN: 9783319902128.
Book

Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Place and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC
28/06/2024 → 27/12/2025
Research

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Strategic Internationalisation Fund 2022/2023
01/04/2023 → 31/07/2023
Other

Wetland Times
01/04/2023 → 31/10/2026
Research

Anthropocene (A)synchronicities
01/03/2023 → 31/12/2024
Research

Valuing the Anthropocene
01/03/2023 → 01/12/2024
Research

Seed Funding: BA-KNAW Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on The Anthropocene
01/09/2021 → 31/03/2022
Research

'ich lebe ich schreibe'. Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021)
Participation in conference - Academic

Workshop with Dr Rey Conquer, Translator-in-Residence at the Holocaust Centre North
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Water Temporalities
Participation in conference - Academic

Anticipation 2024
Participation in conference - Academic

Conservation Humanities Network (External organisation)
Membership of network

Conservation Humanities inaugural network meeting
Participation in conference - Academic