Nathan K. Hensley works on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, critical theory, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. In broadest terms, his work and teaching aim to account for the ability of literary and other aesthetic forms to challenge existing orders of thinking and struggle toward imagining the new. His book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford 2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary representation to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. A second project puts concerns with global justice in dialogue with ecological thinking; its goal is to show how the nineteenth century used aesthetic forms to think about massive, distributed systems and the failure of those systems. His writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Genre, e-flux journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. With Philip Steer, he is co-editor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham 2019). Other collaborative work includes a coedited special issue of RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net and essay clusters for Modernism/Modernity and Victorian Literature and Culture. In 2013 Hensley served on the jury for the Caine Prize in African Writing and in 2015 directed the Lannan Symposium, "In Nature's Wake: The Art and Politics of Environmental Crisis." With Dana Luciano and John McNeill, he co-directed the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change" at Georgetown. Hensley 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. In 2020 Hensley received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching awarded by Georgetown College.
