Selected Publications:
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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.
 Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962) Courtesy of the Estate of Diane Arbus |
Department of English The University of Chicago 1115 East 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Office: Walker 514 Phone: (773) 702-8540 Fax: (773) 702-2495 dnelson@uchicago.edu |
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