Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. Other interests include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016, paperback 2018), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. A second project is about action, and draws on ecological thinking to understandhow literary works imagine categories like will and personhood in the context of failing systems. With Philip Steer (Massey University, NZ), he has coedited a collection of essays, Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2019). With Thomas S. Davis, he coedited a cluster on Modernism/Modernity's Print + platform called "Scale and Form; or what was Global Modernism" (2018); and in 2020 edited, with Molly Clark Hillard, a cluster of essays for Victorian Literature and Culture on "Commitment." His scholarship has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction,Nineteenth Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and other venues. Other writing is in e-flux journal, the Ecologist, the Stanford Arcade, theLos Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere online. His essay on George Eliot and temporality won the Richard Stein Essay Prize, awarded by the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCS). Hensley has served on the jury for the Caine Prize in African Writing and directed the 2015 Lannan Symposium, "In Nature's Wake: The Art and Politics of Environmental Crisis." In collaboration with Brian Hochman, Hensley cofounded and codirected the Modernities Working Group at Georgetown (2012-2016). And with Dana Luciano and John McNeill, he codirected the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change."
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Hensley was born in Fresno, California, and holds degrees from Vassar College (B.A.), the University of Notre Dame (M.A.), and Duke (Ph.D), where he was also a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Before coming to Georgetown, he was assistant professor of English at Macalester College. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.