Holly Nelson

Holly Nelson is a doctoral student and Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, pursuing a dual Ph.D. in English and History and a Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies. Her research centers on the modernist movement in dance and literature, focusing primarily on the transatlantic dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance.

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. She won the Department of History's Arthur Kouguell Memorial Prize for her honors thesis on the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Department of Anthropology's Michel-Rolph Trouillot Prize for her essay on Zora Neale Hurston's playwriting. In 2023, she was awarded the Dante Society of America's annual Dante Prize—for the best undergraduate essay in North America in Dante Studies—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, "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.

Holly has presented papers at conferences including Modernist Studies Association, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Modern Language Association (forthcoming) and Dance Studies Association (forthcoming). Her writing appears in Lagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, Writing with MLA Style, and James Joyce Quarterly.