Dr Nicholas Martin MA, DPhil

• D.Phil., University of Oxford 
• M.A., University of Oxford 
• B.A., University of Oxford, in Philosophy and Modern Languages (First Class Honours) 

• B.A., M.A., New College, Oxford
• D.Phil., Jesus College, Oxford
• Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford (1990-94)
• Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow (1994-95)
• Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews (1995-2004)
• Visiting professor at California State University, Long Beach (2004) and Loyola University Maryland (2011-12)

Dr Martin teaches the following undergraduate courses in the Department of Modern Languages:

• German language (at all levels) 
• Nietzsche (final-year option) 
• German First World War Writing (final-year option) 
• Fascism in Western Europe (final-year option) 
• Thomas Mann (second-year option) 
• Cultures of Protest and Terror in West Germany, 1967-1977 (second-year option)  

He also teaches on a variety of Modern Languages and European Studies programmes at postgraduate level.

Nicholas Martin has supervised seven PhD theses and eleven Master's dissertations to successful completion.

PhD topics he has recently supervised include: Shakespeare and German Unification; a comparative investigation of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Dionysian creativity in works by D’Annunzio and Thomas Mann; Nietzsche, Goethe and the idea of “Bildung”; literary uses of biblical imagery in works by Hartmann von Aue, Kafka and Thomas Mann.

Dr Martin is currently supervising Patrick Harsch’s PhD project, entitled ‘Individual and collective responsibility in selected First World War fiction [published] since 1990’

He welcomes applications from prospective postgraduate students keen to research modern German intellectual history and/or the cultural history of war and political violence in twentieth-century Germany.

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Find out more - our PhD German Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

PhD title

Untimely Aesthetics: a critical comparison of Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe and Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1993)

Nicholas Martin researches aspects of modern German intellectual history and the cultural history of war and political violence in twentieth-century Germany.

His research specialisms are:

• The reception of Weimar classicism 

• The roots and reception of Nietzsche's thought 

• The First World War in German culture and memory 

• The writings of Thomas Mann 

• Nazi cultural practices and their legacies

Academic CV

• Editor-in-chief, Forum for Modern Language Studies
• Editorial Board member of Publications of the English Goethe Society and Journal of War and Culture Studies