Deborah Nelson

Deborah Nelson is the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and the College and Dean of the Arts & Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Prof. Nelson’s field of interest is late 20th century U.S. culture and politics, which include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. She has been recently working on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on a topic which her and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.

Prof. Nelson is the author of several publications including two books: Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017) and Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2001). She co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In addition, she is a founding member of the Post45, which is a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945.