Nicola Mazzotti

Nicola Mazzotti joined Yale’s German department as a graduate student in 2024. He was initially trained in German and English literatures at the Università degli Studi di Trieste and Freie Universität Berlin (B.A. 2020). Subsequently, he studied comparative literature at Dartmouth College (M.A. 2023) and FU Berlin (M.A. 2024). In his recent research, he examined how certain literary texts reveal complex layers of time sedimented in murky landscapes, where the human and the non-human are inextricably intertwined. Nicola now intends to pursue further research on the relationship between humanity and the landscape, especially in the German-speaking world. Specifically, he aims 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 NSDAP and its racist agrarian ideology of Blood and Soil.