Affiliation: Ruhr University Bochum
Key Words: Comparative Literature – Arboreal Poetics – Disaster Studies
Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor of comparative literature at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her research focuses on the production of knowledge under precarious circumstances and thus takes the theories and methods of comparative literature to all kinds of texts. Comparing science writing and science fiction, literary and philosophical texts as part of the same processes of cultural formation, she has worked on a wide array of topics ranging from the Tunguska-Event (a paradigmatically unexplained explosion in Siberia, 1908) to global warming, village ecologies and, the literary and cultural lives of trees. Her main focus areas are catastrophes/disasters, literary and cultural plant studies, 19th century Realism (especially in Germanophone village stories), epistemology and the interconnections of media and physical environments (precarious natures).
She is the author of Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care (Palgrave, forthcoming in Oct. 2025), Fremde Verwandtschaft. Eine Kulturpoetik der Bäume (Wallstein 2025), an illustrated nature essay on ferns titled Farne. Ein Portrait (Matthes und Seitz, 2024), as well as a study on Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (Widerständige Naturen, Wehrhahn 2018) and the Tunguska-Event (Die Produktion der Katastrophe. Das Tunguska-Ereignis und die Programme der Moderne, transcript 2017). She has co-edited special issues of the Journal Ecozon@ with Eva Horn on the connections of bodies and atmospheres in “Cultures of Climate” (2020). Together with Svenja Engelmann-Kewitz and Kirsten Jüdt she co-edited “Disruptive Encounters” (2024) to explore the ambiguous aspects of encounters with more-than-human nature. In “Arboreal Imaginaries” (Green Letters, 2021) Helga Braunbeck and Solvejg Nitzke assemble essays on the “shared cultures of trees and humans”.
https://www.komparatistik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mitarbeiter/nitzke/index.html.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8852-0913
Photo Credit: @blendeauf