Deborah Nelson
Areas of Study: Department of English Language and Literature Office of the Provost Teaching Since 1996 Contact: Email Interests:
American Literature, Gender and Sexuality, 20th Century American Literature
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.
Elisa Tamarkin on the fall of Saigon and the end of an era in war reporting with special guest Dean Deborah L. Nelson
How does it feel to recognize a historical ending while still living through it?
Named one of LitHub’s most anticipated books of the year, Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigonreconstructs the final days of the Vietnam War through the papers of the author’s stepfather, the Chicago Daily News Saigon bureau chief, who filed the last American correspondent’s report as Saigon fell in 1975. Social historian Elisa Tamarkin connects this personal history to the changing culture of war correspondence and the decline of the city newspaper, offering a meditation on how we understand, and record, the end of an era.
Tamarkin will situate the evacuation of Saigon in the mindset of the 1970s, psychologies of belief and defeat, existentialist philosophy, and the ongoing problem of raising political consciousness around world events, even when we have access to all the information we ever need to know.
Guest Interlocutor: Deborah L. Nelson
Dean of the Arts & Humanities Division Deborah L. Nelson will join Tamarkin for a special conversation following Tamarkin’s presentation, bringing her own work in twentieth-century American culture and politics to questions of history, memory, and journalism.
Free and open to the public, but registration is required. This event is presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op.
Speaker(s): Elisa Tamarkin and Deborah L. Nelson