Nicola Thomas

Profile

Nicola Thomas is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Nottingham, and has since taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on poetry, especially contemporary poetry in English and German, and ideas of space, time, science and nature. Her first monograph, Space, Place and Poetry in English and German 1960-1975 (Palgrave: 2018), was a comparative study of poetry’s engagement with space across these two language areas. She is currently working on a monograph study of extra-terrestrial space in modern and contemporary poetry, which reveals how the perspective and scalar transformation afforded by the reality of space travel in the 20th century affects poetry’s understanding of planetarity. She also co-convenes the British Academy-funded interdisciplinary research network ‘Anthropocene Times’ (with Blake Ewing), and the Institute’s Languages and Environments reading group (with Kasia Mika, Joseph Ford and Dan Finch-Race).