Rob Nixon serves as Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Professor Nixon researches in the areas of creative nonfiction; postcolonial literatures; world literature in English; environmentalism and literature; African and Caribbean literatures; contemporary British literature.
Professor Nixon participated in a roundtable discussion in Professor Carby’s graduate seminar “Transnational Imaginary” and delivered a public lecture titled “Slow Violence, Neoliberalism and the Environmental Picaresque.” During his lecture Professor Nixon analyzed the intersection of fiction, violence, and environmentalism. His lecture engaged the “relative invisibility of slow violence, that is, calamities whose fatal repercussions are neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but dispersed across space and postponed across time.” In bringing together problems of ecology and human disposability by way of fiction, Professor Nixon’s lecture sought to investigate “the way writers have repurposed the figure of the picaro to breathe imaginative life into both the dynamics of slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor.”