About
Holly Nelson is a third-year doctoral student, Rackham Merit Fellow, and World Performance Studies Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A dual-degree Ph.D. student in History and English, Holly researches the modernist movement in literature and dance, with an emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance in transnational contexts.
Holly received her B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) in History, English, and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities in 2023 from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow mentored by The Addams Family’s John Astin. At Hopkins, she won the Department of History's Arthur Kouguell Thesis Prize and the Department of Anthropology's Michel-Rolph Trouillot Essay Prize. In 2023, she won the Dante Society of America’s annual Dante Prize, for the best undergraduate essay in North America in Dante Studies.
At U-M, Holly is the Coordinator of the Drama and Performance Interest Group, former Coordinator of the American Studies Consortium, and a Research Associate at the Detroit River Story Lab. She is also the Instructor for English 125, "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 research at U-M has been generously funded by the Rackham Graduate School, the Center for World Performance Studies, and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia.
Holly has presented papers at conferences including Modernist Studies Association, Dance Studies Association, and Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Her writing appears in Choreographic Practices and James Joyce Quarterly.
