Anahid Nersessian

Anahid Nersessian is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarship focuses on 18th-Century and Romantic British literature, critical theory, Marxism, ecocriticism, and biopolitics. In 2022-23, she served as an American Philosophical Society Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, contributing to the three-year Project on Decoloniality.

• Education:
  • B.A., Yale University
  • Ph.D., University of Chicago

Her research explores how Romantic poetry intersects with contemporary crises, particularly capitalism, industrialization, and ecological collapse. She has authored three books: Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021), The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (2020), and Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (2015). Nersessian is also the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and co-editor of the Thinking Literature imprint with Nan Z. Da.

She contributes to public intellectual discourse through writings in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her critical approach blends personal narrative with historical and political analysis, exemplified in her Keats’s Odes finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award. Nersessian’s work challenges the boundaries between poetic form and social critique, emphasizing the irreducibility of poetic knowledge to data or historical facts.