- 513-745-3180
- Hinkle 221
- ML HIN-123
Nate Windon
Assistant Professor, English Department
I maintain the uncontroversial belief that books are the greatest medium for relaying human experience that has ever existed and that literacy is the high watermark of our species. Books, and the way they dilate our attention, acquaint us with the lives of others, and require silence, are an antidote to what ails us. If they have become hard to read it is only an indication of how desperately we need to read them.
I study pre-1900 American literature and culture and, in doing so, take seriously the possibility that nineteenth-century Americans were even as we are. By examining the writings of thoughtful people of that time, we can learn how to write, think, and live well. We can also examine our uncanny resemblances. Reading about the past helps us to live more fully in the present since the past, as William Faulkner put it, “isn’t even past.”
At Xavier I teach courses in the Core Curriculum (on Thoreau for CORE 100, most recently, as well as Literature and the Moral Imagination), in the English Department (Methods, Senior Seminar, and upper-level courses in pre-1900 American literature), and in the Medical and Health Humanities program.
My recent scholarship has been on the spectators that visited P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and to what degree we are different from them; on Henry George, the popular reformer who proclaimed that private property in land ought to be abolished and whose ideas inspired the board game Monopoly; and on the auction system of poor relief, in which New England towns auctioned off the care of their poor to the lowest bidder, a practice which persisted even after the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. My work has been published in American Literature and American Quarterly, in addition to other venues.
I am currently working on an article on desertion during the American Civil War and a manuscript on old age and how an aversion to it became embedded in American society across the long nineteenth century.
My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities through long-term fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Omohundro Institute, as well as by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the Maryland Center for History and Culture; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin; and the New England Fellowship Consortium.
I received my B.A. from Messiah University in 2010; M.A. from the University of Connecticut in 2012; and Ph.D. from Penn State in 2018. Before arriving in Cincinnati in 2022 I taught at Loyola University Maryland.
- 513-745-3180
- Hinkle 221
- ML HIN-123
I maintain the uncontroversial belief that books are the greatest medium for relaying human experience that has ever existed and that literacy is the high watermark of our species. Books, and the way they dilate our attention, acquaint us with the lives of others, and require silence, are an antidote to what ails us. If they have become hard to read it is only an indication of how desperately we need to read them.
I study pre-1900 American literature and culture and, in doing so, take seriously the possibility that nineteenth-century Americans were even as we are. By examining the writings of thoughtful people of that time, we can learn how to write, think, and live well. We can also examine our uncanny resemblances. Reading about the past helps us to live more fully in the present since the past, as William Faulkner put it, “isn’t even past.”
At Xavier I teach courses in the Core Curriculum (on Thoreau for CORE 100, most recently, as well as Literature and the Moral Imagination), in the English Department (Methods, Senior Seminar, and upper-level courses in pre-1900 American literature), and in the Medical and Health Humanities program.
My recent scholarship has been on the spectators that visited P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and to what degree we are different from them; on Henry George, the popular reformer who proclaimed that private property in land ought to be abolished and whose ideas inspired the board game Monopoly; and on the auction system of poor relief, in which New England towns auctioned off the care of their poor to the lowest bidder, a practice which persisted even after the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. My work has been published in American Literature and American Quarterly, in addition to other venues.
I am currently working on an article on desertion during the American Civil War and a manuscript on old age and how an aversion to it became embedded in American society across the long nineteenth century.
My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities through long-term fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Omohundro Institute, as well as by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the Maryland Center for History and Culture; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin; and the New England Fellowship Consortium.
I received my B.A. from Messiah University in 2010; M.A. from the University of Connecticut in 2012; and Ph.D. from Penn State in 2018. Before arriving in Cincinnati in 2022 I taught at Loyola University Maryland.
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