Nicolas Pethes is professor of German Literature at the University of Cologne, where he also received his PhD in 1998. He was visiting scholar at the Universities of Siegen (1998-2001) and Stanford (2001-2003), directed an Emmy Noether-research group at the University of Bonn (2003-2007), and was professor of European and German Literature at the Universities of Hagen (2005-2009) and Bochum (2009-2014). His research focuses on cultural memory studies, the media history of literature, literature & science studies, the discourse history of popular culture, and the theory of prose.