Cary Nelson is AAUP president and professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Statements and Open Letters
Supporting Diversity
Speaker Cancellation
Working to End At-Whim Employment of Contingent Faculty.
Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press.
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Recent Academe Columns
Ethics and Corporatization. January-February 2010.
Don’t Mourn, Organize. January-February 2010.
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Video
Interviews with Marc Bousquet:
Part I, Twilight of Academic Freedom
Part II, The Academic Working Poor
Biography
Cary Nelson is a well-known scholar-activist and professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An author or editor of twenty-five books and the author of 150 articles, he previously served on the AAUP’s national Council for ten years, the last six as second vice president.
In such books as Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (1999), and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (2004), the last two coauthored with Stephen Watt, Nelson has written widely on most of the major issues confronting the academy: academic freedom, collective bargaining, contingent labor, corporatization, globalization, the Internet, political correctness, sexual harassment, and the relationship between teaching and research. He regularly lectures around the United States and abroad and is frequently interviewed about higher education.
Nelson’s primary field of scholarship is modern American poetry. His books Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (1989) and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001) have been at the center of the effort to reform and expand the American poetry canon. But he has also been an academic activist for years, defending the rights of graduate students and part-time faculty, joining union rallies across the country. He has also served on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association.
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