Nina Engelhardt is a final year PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She studied Comparative and General Literature and English Literature at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (BA) and at the Université Paris IV – Sorbonne, and obtained her MSc in Comparative and General Literature from the University of Edinburgh in 2008.

In her PhD project, Nina focuses on the role of mathematics in literature, examining in what ways and to what effects aspects of mathematics and of the history and philosophy of mathematics are employed in novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century. She is working on novels by Thomas Pynchon, Hermann Broch and Robert Musil in particular, while also researching the interrelations of science and literature in general.

Forthcoming publications:

‘The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day‘. Modernist Nowheres: Utopianism, Knowledge, and Power in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory. Ed. Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Accepted for publication.

‘Mathematics, Reality and Fiction in Pynchon’s Against the Day‘. Of Pynchon and Vice: America’s Inherent Others. Ed. Zofia Kolbuszewska. Accepted for publication.

Nina Engelhardt is a participant of the Winter School 2012.