Rob Nixon is the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University, where he teaches creative nonfiction and environmental studies. Until 2015 he held the Rachel Carson Professorship in English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of four books: London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin; Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond; Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy; and, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP), which was selected by Choice as an outstanding book of 2012.
Dreambirds was chosen by Esquire as one of the best ten books of the year and by the New York Times as a notable book of the year. Slow Violence has received four prizes: an American Book Award; the 2012 Sprout prize from the International Studies Association for the best book in environmental studies; the 2012 Interdisciplinary Humanities Award for the best book to straddle disciplines in the humanities; and the 2013 biennial ASLE Award for the best book in environmental literary studies.
Rob Nixon is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, where he writes on environmentalism and on literature and culture from the global South. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Slate, Truthout, Huffington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Chronicle of Higher Education, Critical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Formations and elsewhere. He has delivered lectures on six continents on subjects ranging from environmental justice to nonfiction to the literatures and cultures of the global South.
Rob Nixon started out as an activist and socially engaged writer working for the overthrow of apartheid. He has since focused on environmentalism and public writing, particularly in relation to struggles for environmental justice in the global South.
Nixon has been awarded an NEH, a Fulbright, a MacArthur Foundation International Peace and Security Fellowship, and a Guggenheim (which he declined). He has also held a number of residencies at leading artist colonies, including Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Arts, MacDowell and Yaddo.