Nicola Mazzotti

Areas of Interest

19th and 20th Century Literatures (with a focus on German, Austrian, and Italian), Temporal Theories in Literature, Philosophy (Idealism, Frankfurter Schule, and Post-structuralism), Environmental Humanities, Political Theory

Bio

Nicola Mazzotti joined Yale’s German Department as a graduate student in 2024. He was first trained in German and English literatures at the Università degli Studi di Trieste and FU Berlin (B.A. 2020), culminating in a project on the shift from utopia to dystopia in the two versions of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm. Subsequently, he studied Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College (M.A. 2023) and FU Berlin (M.A. 2024). His recent research projects focused on the works of the writer and Germanist Claudio Magris, particularly on the aesthetic proper times (Eigenzeiten) produced by the combination of now-time and non-contemporariness (Ungleichzeitigkeit) in his works.

A recipient of the 2024-2025 Whitney Fellowship for Environmental Humanities, Nicola intends to pursue further research on the relationship between humanity and the landscape, especially in the German-speaking area, an interest he already touched upon in his provious scholarly work. Specifically, he wants to investigate how the agency of the soil as a political and aesthetic metaphor formed new discourses in Germany after 1945, following the demise of the agrarian ideology Blut und Boden.