Nicola Gess is a Professor of German Literature at the University of Basel. Before coming to Basel in 2010, she worked in the Comparative Literature Departement at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she also wrote her Habilitation (second book), and in the German Departement at the University of Regensburg. She did her graduate work in German Literature and Musicology at Princeton University and received her PhD in German Literature and Cultural Studies from Princeton University and the Humboldt Universität Berlin. She has worked on a wide variety of issues in German studies, but her main foci of interest are the intersections of literature and the other arts, theatre and opera studies, literature and science studies, literary primitivism, poetics and aesthetics. She is the author of »Gewalt der Musik. Literatur und Musikkritik um 1800« (2011, 2nd edition), and »Primitives Denken. Wilde, Kinder und Wahnsinnige in der literarischen Moderne (Müller, Musil, Benn, Benjamin)« (2013). She is currently involved in two research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: »Poetics and Aesthetics of Amazement« and »The Visuality of Baroque Opera,« the latter being part of the NCCR Iconic Criticism, and she is also a founding member of the DFG-Research-Network »Auditory Knowledge in Transition. An Epistemic History of Listening in Modernity.«