Title: Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English

Department: English

Office: 313 Benson Science Hall
Phone: 615-343-3185
Fax: 615-343-8028
Email: dana.d.nelson@vanderbilt.edu

Degrees

• 1984 B.A. Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• 1986 M.A. Michigan State University
• 1989 Ph.D. Michigan State University

Research Area

• American colonial literatures and history
• Early US literature and history
• democracy studies, race theory, gender theory, political theory

Current Research

• (Book) Ugly Democracy. This study tracks the interplay of aesthetic, social and political models of democratic representation, as a way to a) trace out alternative conceptions of democracy practiced and imagined in the early United States, b) to understand how they were lost from our democratic archive for citizenship, and c) to think about how these alternative might work for us today.

Current Positions

• Professor of English

Previous Positions

• Professor of English and Social Theory, University of Kentucky; Visiting Associate Professor of English and Guest Editor, American Literature, Duke Univerity; Hilen Visiting Professor of English, University of Washington; Assistant, Associate Professor of English, Louisiana State University.

Professional Societies

• American Studies Association
• Modern Languages Association
• MELUS
• Society for Early Americanists

Publications

• Books:
• Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. Minnesota University Press, Fall 2008. http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/nelson_bad.html
• National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Duke University Press, 1998.
• The Word in Black and White: Reading `Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
• Collections:
• With Russ Castronovo. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Duke Univ. Press, 2002.
• Editions:
• Lydia Maria Child, Romance of the Republic (1867). University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
• Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, (1812). Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
• Dual edition of and Introduction to Frances Ann Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863) and her daughter Frances Butler Leigh's Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1883). Published as Principles and Privilege: Two Women’s Lives on a Georgia Plantation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
• Journal:
• Special issue. "AmBushed: On the Costs of Macht-Politik," South Atlantic Quarterly 15.1 (Jan. 2006), November 2005.
• Special issue co-edited with Houston Baker. "Violence, the Body and The South,” American Literature, 73.2 (June2001).