Laura Kathryn Nelson, whose work engages with media studies, critical pedagogy, intermedial arts, literatures of ecological crisis, and social movement history, has been appointed to the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor of English. Her official start date is July 1, 2025.

“We are delighted to welcome Laura Nelson, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Ph.D. from Harvard University,” said Department of English Chair Simon Gikandi, the Class of 1943 University Professor of English. “Laura’s appointment marks a bold move by the English department into the field of media studies, aesthetic theory, and literary publics across platforms, audiences, and communities.”

Nelson comes to Princeton from The Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where for the 2024-25 academic year she has been a Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a book, After School: Reimagining Education Through Radical Experiments in Study, that is now under contract with Princeton University Press.

After School traces a story of non-traditional education, following activists, artists, and educators around the world who see education as central to bringing about environmental, political, and social change. The book’s structure is inspired by a syllabus, and each of its ten short chapters turns to a different learning formation in which people convene to rethink the institutions around them and gesture toward other worlds in their practice and learning.

Envisioning and organizing such ventures form a through-line in Nelson’s work. In her time in Los Angeles, she co-organized Place Settings, a site-specific lecture series with artists and academics in settings such as film sets, waterways, and oil fields; and Adaptions, a literary salon focused on the adaptation of works across mediums. She also organized Practices of Study, a dinner series for educators, artists, and organizers interested in reimagining education and building alternative spaces of learning in cities.

As a fellow in the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, in August 2020 Nelson formed the Library of Study. A moving site, it began as a lending library in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, and hosted study groups, poetry readings, and performances. In the spring and summer of 2021, it continued to host free lending libraries and informal weekly “study groups” where people gathered to share ideas, texts, and resources.

As a visiting professor at the Tidelines Institute campus in Gustavus, Alaska in spring 2021, Nelson taught a course, “Freedom Dreams, Radical Visions, and Otherwise Worlds.” A place-based organization, Tidelines offerings include short courses and the Glacier Bay Year, a six-month gap year experience for young people ages 18-24, modeled along Deep Springs College’s “three pillars”: rigorous intellectual work across the liberal arts and sciences; labor (at Tidelines, working an Alaskan homestead); and student democratic self-governance.

While in doctoral study at Harvard University, Nelson held teaching fellowships in American studies, literature, and general education, and received Harvard Distinction in Teaching Awards for all courses taught, including “High and Low in Postwar America,” “American Dreams and Disillusions,” “Global Fictions,” and “The American Novel.”

After receiving her Ph.D. in American studies in 2021, Nelson continued on at Harvard for the 2021-22 academic year as a lecturer in the History and Literature Program, Harvard’s oldest concentration, teaching the courses “Forms of Memory in Film and Literature,” “Narratives of Gender & Sexuality in the Age of Late Capitalism,” and “Radical Education.”

Through academic years 2022-24, Nelson held a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California. In the summer of 2024, she taught as faculty in Bard College’s Language and Thinking Program, a three-week intensive introduction to the liberal arts and sciences with a focus on writing, required of all incoming Bard students in order to matriculate.

At the University of Oxford through a 2011-13 Rhodes Fellowship, she earned a Master of Studies in English literature and a Master of Science in education.

Recent talks given include “The Kitchen Table as a Site of Study” at the November 2024 American Studies Association Annual Conference, and “Creative Marxism and the California Labor School” at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (New York City) in October 2024.

“Laura Nelson’s innovative work thinks deeply and widely about nontraditional forms of education and insurgent practices of study,” said Associate Chair and Professor of English Gayle Salamon. “We are tremendously excited to have her join us in the English department.”

Among recent journal publications are, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Thinking in Ruins: On the Llano del Rio Experiment” (May 2023), and “Fracture and Assembly: On Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping.” (Jan. 2023), and in May #23, “A Poetics of Habitation: On Renee Gladman” (April, 2025).