Deborah L. Nelson, Deputy Provost
Deborah L. Nelson
Deborah L. Nelson is an Associate Professor of English and the College at the University of Chicago and the former director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In September 2011, she became the University’s second Deputy Provost of Graduate Education, whose office provides a university-wide perspective on issues that affect the graduate student experience.
After receiving her PhD and a certificate in Women’s Studies from the City University of New York in 1996, Nelson joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where she teaches late 20th-century US literature and culture. She has advised 31 doctoral students to successful dissertation defence.
Nelson is the author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (Columbia University Press, 2002), the forthcoming Tough Broads: Suffering and Style, and she edited Gender and Culture in the 1950s, an issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her articles have been published in American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Feminist Studies and in several edited collections (Compassion, The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, The Cambridge Companion to 20th-Century Poetry and others).
Nelson received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and currently leads a Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar called “@1948.” She is a founding member of the research collective, Post45, which publishes a book series at Stanford University Press and an online journal.
