Nicholas T Boggs

Twentieth and twenty-first century literatures in English, especially American literature and African American literature; James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison; gender and sexuality studies; literary biography; hybrid genres; creative writing.

Modern Language Association; Association of Writing Professionals

Robert and Ina Caro Travel and Research Fellowship, Biographer's International Organization, Summer 2019; Fellowship, The Camargo Foundation Core Program in the Arts and Humanities, Cassis, France, 2018; Residency, The Corporation of Yaddo, 2017; Scholarship in Non-Fiction, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, 2011-2013; Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, Paris and Saint Paul-de-Vence, France, 2013; Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, 2012 and 2011; Artist's Fellowship in Literature, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, 2008; Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University, 2005-2006; Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, Columbia University, 2003-2004.

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely" and Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW and on Black America TV. He was also featured on a panel about the book at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Library of Congress, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Camargo Foundation, he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Prof. Boggs will be on leave for academic year 2019-2020 and will spend Spring 2020 as Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut.