Associate Professor
Department of English
Deputy Provost for Graduate Education, 2011-14

Office: Walker 514
dnelson@uchicago.edu

My main research and teaching interests lie in late 20th-century American literature, gender studies, American ethnic literature, poetry and poetics, autobiography, photography, and Cold War history. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence as a topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades. My next project, provisionally titled Tough Broads, explores the unsentimental, rigorous, and often "heartless" view of pain (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt) in the work of some of the 20th-century's most prominent women artists and intellectuals. From this new work, I am publishing an article on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and an another on the photography of Diane Arbus and its reception by Susan Sontag. In addition to courses directly related to my research interests—"Culture of the Cold War" (Eng. 664), "Tough Broads" (Eng. 355), "Shock Treatment and Nervous Systems" (Eng. 671)—I also teach Asian American literature, including but not limited to poetry (Form and Experience in Asian American Poetry), as well as general introductions to postwar literature, postmodern autobiography, and confessional writing.

Courses

Graduate: Culture of Cold War; Law, Literature, and Sexual Revolution; Post-Modern Autobiography; Shock Treatments and Nervous Systems; Traumatic Cosmopolitanism: Around 1948 (co-taught with James Sparrow)

Undergraduate: Media Aesthetics; New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel; Postwar U.S. Literature; Transatlantic Intimacies

Selected Publications

• "The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anaesthetics of Empathy," American Literary History, Winter 2006.
• "Sylvia Plath and the Cold War" in the Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Jo Gill, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Guest Editor, Special Issue of WSQ "Gender and Culture in the 1950s," Dec. 2005.
• "Suffering and Thinking: The Scandal of Tone in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem" in Compassion, edited by Lauren Berlant for the English Institute, Routledge Press, 2004.
• Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, Columbia University Press, 2001.
• "Beyond Privacy: Confessions Between a Woman and Her Doctor," Feminist Studies, Summer 1999.
• "Penetrating Privacy: Confessional Poetry and the Surveillance Society," Home/Making: The Poetics and Politics of Home, edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes.

Education

Ph.D., City University of New York, 1996. Teaching at Chicago since 1996.