Holly Nelson

Holly Nelson is a first-year Ph.D. student in English Language and Literature and Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan. 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. Her research interests include modernism, performance studies, and the medical humanities. An avid dancer, choreographer, and actress herself, Holly has written several prizewinning conference papers on twentieth-century theatre and dance, founded primarily on archival research she conducted at Hopkins as a Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow. Holly is currently developing academic interests in cognitive literary studies and ecocriticism, which spring from her undergraduate honors thesis, “The Gifted Consciousness: Reading Neurodivergence through Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and a seminar paper on ecofeminist theology in Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio.