CARY

NELSON CAPSULE
BIOGRAPHY
Cary Nelson was born in 1946 and grew up in
Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He received a
B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio (1967) and a Ph.D. from the
University of Rochester in New York (1970). Since the fall of
1970 he has taught modern poetry and literary theory at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now
Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of
English Emeritus. He is also an affiliate professor at the
University of Haifa (Israel). His campus work has included a
decades-long project of building up the holdings in modern
poetry and the Spanish Civil War in the library’s Rare Book and
Special Collections Department.

Nelson is known not only as a blunt and devastatingly witty commentator on higher education
but also as an activist working hard to reform it. He was active in the effort to unionize the Champaign-
Urbana faculty in the 1970s, in the drive to recognize a graduate employee union twenty years later, and
in the successful faculty organizing drives at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of
Oregon in 2011 and 2012. As a member of the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly he co-
authored a number of reform proposals, including a major project to document salaries for contingent
faculty in English and foreign languages. As a member of the organization’s Executive Council he helped
assure that these projects were completed. For twenty years he served on the National Council of the
American Association of University Professors; he served as the Association’s second Vice President from
2000-2006 and as its national president from 2006-2012. He coauthored the Association’s Redbook
statements on graduate students, academic professionals, and intellectual property and founded its
online Journal of Academic Freedom.

All these commitments are consistent with his history. His family was active in the anti-nuclear
movement. As a student, Nelson joined the famous 1963 Washington, D.C., march where Martin Luther
King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Later he worked as an assistant teacher in Harlem in New York for
a year. He was active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s and served as a draft counselor during the
Vietnam War. As a scholar, one of his main interests is in preserving the cultural heritage of the American
Left. He discovered and published Edwin Rolfe’s anti-McCarthy poems and co-edited Madrid 1937, a
massive collection of letters written home by American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. He edited the
first comprehensive anthology of modern American poetry for Oxford University press, at the same time
addressing contemporary topics like political correctness, hate speech regulations, sexual harassment,
academic unionization, and the financial crisis in higher education.
 “Nelson has always been a doer and a risk-taker.” So wrote a reviewer for The Nation in 1997. He
was thinking of a career that has encompassed a major project to redefine Marxism and a continuing
effort to open up and democratize the canon of American poetry. Few commentators are neutral about
Nelson’s impact on higher education. Hailed as a “samurai professor” defending academia’s most
exploited employees, he has also been attacked by conservatives as “a proud betrayer of his discipline.”
Furious at an NEH project funded before he came on board, William Bennett dismissed him as “trendy,”
but reviewers later labeled the project “epoch-making.”

His more than 30 authored or edited books include The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal
Space (1973), Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (1981), Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture (1987), Cultural Studies (1992), Higher Education Under Fire: Politics,
Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1994), Will Work for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (1997),
Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (1999), Revolutionary Memory: Recovering
the Poetry of the American Left (2001), Office Hours : Activism and Change in the Academy (2004), No
University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), Anthology of Modern and Contemporary
American Poetry (2014), The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2015), and Dreams Deferred: A
Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Movement to Boycott Israel (2016). He is the
author of over 300 essays, including a number published in Academe, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
and Inside Higher Education.His op eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere. He has been interviewed on both US and Israeli
television.

Cary is married to Paula A. Treichler, a University of Illinois faculty member whose books include
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (1999).

Cary Nelson took office as the 49th president of the American Association of University Professors
in June 2006, was reelected in 2008, and again in 2010. Both in those years and since he has been active
in opposing all academic boycotts. He has also written widely in support of a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in opposition to the BDS movement.

A book about Cary Nelson's work and career, with essays by twenty contributors--Cary Nelson
and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession, edited by Michael Rothberg and
Peter Garrett--was published by SUNY Press in 2009.