Christopher Nealon teaches American literature, aesthetic theory, and the intellectual histories that bear on the history of poetry. He also regularly teaches courses that explore how the humanities have conceived of capitalism. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1997, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008.

He has written three books of criticism:  Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001), The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011), and Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital (2023). He is the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of the collection After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (2022). He is also the author of five books of poetry, including The Shore, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume of poems is All About You (2024).

From 2012 to 2014, he co-directed, with Professor Beverly Silver, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar at JHU on "Capitalism in the 21st Century". His current research is on the relation between literary and economic understandings of value, and their implications for academic antihumanism. One aim of this research is to be able to answer the question, how did the critique of “the human,” which began the 20th century as a conservative intellectual project, move across the course of 100 years to being a progressive, even a “leftist” one?