BA, MA, PhD
Dr Nicholas Gaskill received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and his BA in English from Birmingham-Southern College in 2003. In 2014-15, he was a fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum. He joined Oriel College in 2018 as the new Fellow in American Literature, and he is Associate Professor of American Literature in the Faculty of English Language and Literature.
Before coming to Oxford, Dr Gaskill taught in the English Department at Rutgers University and, before that, in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.
Dr Gaskill works on American literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with special interests in aesthetics, critical methods, and the relation between literature and philosophy (especially pragmatism).
His current project, “Intensity and the Feeling of Life,” elaborates the history and meaning of a fundamental aesthetic category of modernity: intensity. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe and moving up to present, Dr Gaskill tracks the emergence of intensity as an aesthetic ideal and follow both its shifting fortunes (sometimes praised, sometimes denounced) and the literary styles designed to incite it. Throughout, he argues that for two centuries the category of aesthetic intensity has been a privileged site for articulating the complicated relation between art and life.
His first book, Chromographia, looks at the ways that U.S. writers imagined colour experience between 1880 and 1930. It reads a diverse array of writers – from Stephen Crane and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to L. Frank Baum and Nella Larsen – in light of the material history of chromatic technologies and all the things that bright colour came to stand for at the turn of the twentieth century: commodity culture, “civilisation,” racialised sensation, avant-gardism, the perceptual lives of small children, and much else besides.
Dr Gaskill also has an abiding interest in American pragmatism, both as a historical phenomenon and as a resource for thinking about literature and criticism. One branch of this research has focused on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, not a pragmatist per se but an important figure in the reception and reinvention of pragmatism over the past several decades. Other strands include essays on aesthetic experience and attention, the idea of aesthetic form (as opposed to other types of form), the cognitive work involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the relation between aesthetic artifice and the “sense of reality.” This last topic led him to write about the literary and critical hand-wringing around the relation between facts and fictions sparked by Trump’s first election, in “Reality in America, Redux: On Trump Panic Fiction” (ALH 2024).
Recently, Dr Gaskill has co-edited three journal special issues that approach the topic of aesthetic education from different angles: pedagogy (“Aesthetic Education: A Twenty-First-Century Primer,” with Kate Stanley, PMLA 2023), criticism (“Understanding Criticism,” with Emily Ogden, New Literary History 2024), and philosophy (“Reimagining Aesthetic Education,” with Patrick Hayes, Genre 2027).
Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
In progress: “Intensity in Art and Life”
The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, co-edited with Neel Ahuja, Monique Allewaert, Lindsey Andrews, Gerry Canavan, Rebecca Evans, Nihad Farooq, Erica Fretwell, Patrick Jagoda, Erin Gentry Lamb, Jennifer Rhee, Britt Rusert, Matthew Taylor, Aarti Vadde, Priscilla Wald, and Rebecca Walsh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 689 pages.
The Lure of Whitehead, co-edited with A.J. Nocek (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 496 pages.
“Reimagining Aesthetic Education,” co-edited with Patrick Hayes, Genre, forthcoming 2027.
“Understanding Criticism,” co-edited with Emily Ogden, New Literary History, 54.3-4 (summer 2024).
“Aesthetic Education: A Twenty-First-Century Primer,” co-edited with Kate Stanley, a Theories and Methodologies forum in PMLA 138.1 (January 2023).
“Too Much: On Aesthetic Intensity,” under review.
“Aesthetic Experience in the Attention Economy,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, special issue on “Aesthetic Education and Resistance,” ed. Dustin Breitenwischer, forthcoming 2027.
“Reimagining Aesthetic Education,” with Patrick Hayes, Genre, forthcoming 2027.
“Understanding Criticism: An Introduction,” with Emily Ogden, New Literary History, 54.3-4 (summer 2024): 341-53.
“Criticism and Our Modes of Abstraction,” New Literary History, 54.3-4 (summer 2024): 489-514.
“Aesthetic Education between Perception and Judgment,” Genre 58.1 (April 2025): 93-106, special issue on 25th anniversary of Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic, eds. Merve Emre and Justin Sider
“Reality in America, Redux: On Trump Panic Fiction,” American Literary History 36.4 (winter 2024).
“Aesthetic Education without Guarantees,” co-authored with Kate Stanley, to “Aesthetic Education: A Twenty-First-Century Primer,” a Theories and Methodologies forum in PMLA, 138.1 (January 2023): 127-36.
“How Blue is Red: Language and Sensation in Literature and Philosophy,” Philosophy and Literature 47.2 (October 2023): 294-309.
“Rorty against Rorty: Climate Change, Rug-Pulling, and the Rhetoric of Philosophy,” Common Knowledge, 28.3 (September 2022): 380-401.
“How to Read Color: Writing, Wallpaper, and the Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Word & Image, special issue on “Nineteenth-Century Color,” ed. Charlotte Ribeyrol 36.1 (2020): 7-17.
“The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction,”
Configurations 25.4 (fall 2017): 475-505.
“The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context,” New Literary History 47.4 (autumn 2016): 505-24.
“Red Cars with Red Lights and Red Drivers: Color, Crane, and Qualia,” American Literature 81 (December 2009): 719-45.
“Experience and Signs: Towards a Pragmatist Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 39
(winter 2008): 165-83.
“‘The Light which, Showing the Way, Forbids It’: Reconstructing Aesthetics in The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction 34 (autumn 2006): 161-88.
“The Aesthetic Fact of Intensity: Whitehead’s Theorization of a Modernist Ideal,” for Understanding Whitehead, Understanding Modernism (CUP)
“Imagist Intensity,” Oxford Handbook of Poetry in English, ed. Nadia Nurhussein.
“Like a Color: Chromatic Metaphors in Racial Discourse,” in Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media, eds. Carolyn Kane and Lida Zeitlin-Wu (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025), 69-84.
“The Arts of Attention: Stengers, Fictions, and Aesthetic Education,” in An Ecology of Practices: Thinking with Stengers—Whitehead, Cosmopolitics, Gaia, eds. James Bono, Hugh Crawford, and Steven Meyer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2025).
“The Will to Make Believe,” in William James and Literary Studies, eds. Kristen Case and Kate Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
“Back to the Classroom: What Whitehead Took from Art, and What a New Aesthetic Paradigm Can Take from Whitehead,” More-than-Human Aesthetics: Venturing beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, eds. Melanie Seghal and Alex Wilkie, part of the Dis-positions series, eds. Mike Michael and Alex Wilkie (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024): 205-20.
“Color,” in American Literature in Transition, 1876-1910, Vol. 4 of Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition, ed. Lindsay V. Reckson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022): 263-77.
“Language and Psychology,” in A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry, ed. Alexandra Loske, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Color (London: Bloomsbury, 2021): 131-52.
“Literature and the Performing Arts,” with Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, in A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age, eds. Sarah Street and Anders Steinvall, vol. 6 of A Cultural History of Color (London: Bloomsbury, 2021): 135-53.
“Learning to See with Milton Bradley,” in Bright Modernity, eds. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann, in the German Historical Institute’s “Worlds of Consumption” series (Palgrave, 2017): 55-73.
“The Habit of Art: Whitehead, Aesthetics, and Pragmatism,” in Experience and Reality: Thinking with Whitehead and American Pragmatism, ed. Brian G. Henning, William T. Myers, and Joseph John (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).
“Introduction: An Adventure of Thought,” co-authored with A.J. Nocek, in The Lure of Whitehead, eds. Nicholas Gaskill and A.J. Nocek (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 1-40.
“Introduction,” Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (London and New York, Everyman Library, 2025): vii-xxii.
“Introduction,” The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (London and New York: Everyman Library, 2022): vii-xxii.
“Speculatieve kritiek: Stengers en de literatuurwetenschap,” a Dutch translation of my essay, “Speculative Criticism: On Stengers and Literary Study,” nY #32 (January 2017). English version published online.
“Of Primitives and Primaries,” Cabinet Magazine 61 (spring-summer 2016): 34-41.
Review of Sami Pihlström, Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2022) in European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, XVI.1 (2024): https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ejpap/3947.
Review of Michael Clune, A Defense of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) in Genre 55.1 (April 2022): 49-54.
Review of Herwig Friedl, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) in ALH Online Review, Series XXII. (1,478 words)
Review of Steven Mailloux’s Pragmatism’s Rhetoric: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017) in ALH Online Review, Series XVI (1,500 words)
Review of The Colours of the Past in Victorian England, ed. Charlotte Ribeyrol in Etudes anglaises 70.1 (janier-mars 2017): 115-18.
Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) in ALH Online Review, Series VII, published August 2016 (1,429 words).
“American Literature and the Composition of Experience,” Los Angeles Review of Books (14 February 2014). Review of Paul Grimstad’s Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford UP, 2013). https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/american-literature-composition-experience
“What Difference Can Pragmatism Make for Literary Study?” American Literary History 24 (summer 2012): 374-89.