Deborah Nelson

Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago

**Deborah Nelson** studies late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, (known as Post45 or Post War). She is a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journal\_ Post45\_ and a book series at Stanford University Press. Nelson's interests include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. Nelson's first book, \_Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America\_, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence as a topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.