Deborah Nelson

Deborah Nelson is the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and chair of the department of English. Her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book of 2017 and the Gordan Laing Prize in 2019 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. Tough Enough has now been translated into Spanish, Korean, and German with forthcoming translations in Chinese and Turkish. She is also the author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America and articles published in PMLA, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Feminist Studies and in several edited collections. Nelson led a Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar called “@1948” and edited with Leela Gandhi a special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to the topic. She is a founding member of the research collective, Post45.  She has been the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education (2011-2015) and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (2006-2009).  She has continued her work on graduate education with grants from the NEH (Next Generation Implementation Grant) in 2016 and the Mellon Foundation (Scholarly Careers Initiative) in 2018.