Holly Nelson

Holly Nelson is a second-year doctoral student and Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, pursuing a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and a Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies. Her research interests include performance studies, modernism and modernity, critical dance studies, the Harlem Renaissance, and James Joyce.

Holly is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University (Phi Beta Kappa), where she triple-majored in English, History, and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities. An avid dancer, choreographer, and actress herself, Holly has written several conference papers on twentieth-century performance, founded primarily on archival research she conducted at Hopkins as a Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow, under the mentorship of John Astin (The Addams Family).

In 2023, at Hopkins, Holly won the Arthur Kouguell Memorial Prize for her history thesis on the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Michel-Rolph Trouillot Anthropology Prize for her essay on Zora Neale Hurston's playwriting. She was most recently awarded the Dante Society of America's annual Dante Prize—for the best undergraduate essay in North America on Dante—for her ecofeminist reading of Dante's Purgatorio.

At U-M, Holly is the Co-Coordinator of the American Studies Consortium and a Research Associate at the Detroit River Story Lab. She is also the Graduate Student Instructor for ENGLISH 125-070, "Writing and Academic Inquiry - The Roaring Twenties in Literature and Performance," a writing course that explores the literary and performance cultures of the modernist movement—and its intersectional and transatlantic dimensions.

Her work appears and is forthcoming in Lagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities and James Joyce Quarterly.