Cassandra Nelson

Cassandra Nelson is an assistant professor of English at the United States Military Academy (USMA), where she teaches courses on composition, literature, and the novel. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2014, with a specialization in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and is currently at work on a book about religion, technology, and literary realism in postwar American fiction, provisionally titled Age of Miracles: Fiction, Faith, and the Rise of Screen Media. Other research and teaching interests include religion and literature, the novel, composition, textual criticism, and the history and future of the book.

Her scholarly writing and reviews on modern and contemporary authors—including Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Thomas Pynchon, and Marilynne Robinson—have appeared in Literary Imagination, Essays in Criticism, First Things, Commonweal, Notes and Queries, and the Irish Literary Supplement, among other publications.

Before starting her doctorate, Nelson received an MA from the Editorial Institute at Boston University. For her thesis, she prepared a critical edition of stories by mid-twentieth-century American writer Betty Wahl, several of which were later reprinted or published for the first time in The Antioch Review, The Southern Review, and The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society. In 2010, she edited Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks for Faber and Faber in 2010, making an authoritative text of Beckett's first published book widely available to readers and scholars for the first time.

For more information or to contact her, visit http://scholar.harvard.edu/cmnelson.