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. His first 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. His second book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (Chicago 2025), puts concerns with global justice in dialogue with ecological thinking. Its goal is to show how thinkers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action. Hensley's 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 forthcoming collection coedited with Devin Garofalo ("The Barbara Johnson Collective," Northwestern UP, 2026); a 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." 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.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Professor, College - Department of English
- Secondary
- Director, College - Department of English