Rob Nixon

Rachel Carson Professor of English
608-263-3005
rdnixon@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, Columbia University, 1989
M. Phil., Columbia University, 1984
MA, University of Iowa, 1982
BA, Rhodes University, South Africa 1977

Research Interests

Creative nonfiction; postcolonial literatures; world literature in English; environmentalism and literature; African and Caribbean literatures; Contemporary British literature.

Selected Publications

Slow Violence and Environmental Time (forthcoming, Harvard University Press)

Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador 2000); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and World Beyond (Routledge 1994); London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (OUP 1992).

Dreambirds was selected as a Notable Book of the the year by the New York Times Book Review and as one one of the ten best books of the year by Esquire. It was also serialized as book of the Week on BBC radio.

I am a frequent contributor to The New York Times. My writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian, Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Slate, South Atlantic Quarterly, Transition, Cultural Critique, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Research in African Literature, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and elsewhere.

Personal Statement

I believe strongly in the value of studying literature from a variety of international, interdisciplinary perspectives in our age of accelerating globalization and advancing climate crisis. Key questions that are fore grounded in my research and writing include: environmental time, environmentalism in the global South, the art of the memoir, travel writing, public writing, transAtlanticism, memory, and migration.

Beyond the English Department, I am affiliated with the Center for Culture, History and Environment; the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; Border and Transcultural Studies; and African Studies.I am a past recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, a MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellowship, and an NEH.