Bio

After receiving his B.A. from Oxford, Nicholas Jenkins came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow. He did postgraduate work at Columbia and was then employed as an editor and writer at ARTnews magazine in New York. He earned a D.Phil. from Oxford and, after teaching in the Harvard English Department for two years, where he co-directed the "Modernism in its Contexts" seminar at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, he joined the Stanford English Department.

Jenkins is the author of The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness (2024; published in the US as The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England), winner of the 2024 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism and the Northern California Book Award for General Nonfiction, and a finalist for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

He is also the Primary Investigator for Kindred Britain, described by the Economist as "an amazing digital humanities website that traces relations between 30,000 British people."

Jenkins has edited a Lincoln Kirstein Reader and co-edited and contributed to three volumes of Oxford University Press's "Auden Studies" series. He was General Editor of the Princeton University Press's "Facing Pages" translation series, and he has contributed essays and reviews to periodicals that include the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Raritan and the Yale Review.

Nicholas Jenkins is co-chair of the W. H. Auden Society and the Literary Executor of the poet, scholar and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet.

Academic Appointments

  • Professor, English

Administrative Appointments

  • Director, Creative Writing Program, Stanford University (2024 - 2025)
  • Co-Director, Creative Writing Program, Stanford University (2023 - 2024)
  • Interim Director, Creative Writing Program, Stanford University (2022 - 2023)
  • Director of the CS+X Initiative (VPUE), Stanford University (2013 - 2014)
  • Faculty Director, Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University (2010 - 2014)

Honors & Awards

  • Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University (2024-)
  • Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University (2014-2024)
  • Internal Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center (2014-2015)
  • Internal Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center (2000-2001)
  • Junior Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies (2000-2001)
  • Harkness Fellow, Commonwealth Fund (1986-1988)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

  • General Editor, "Facing Pages", Princeton University Press (2004 - 2012)
  • Co-Chair, W. H. Auden Society (1986 - Present)

Professional Education

  • D.Phil., Oxford University (1997)
  • M.A., Oxford University (1997)
  • B.A., Oxford University (1984)

Contact

  • Academic
    njenkins@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: English Position: Professor
    • 450 Jane Stanford Way
    • Dept Of English Stanford University
    • Stanford,  California  94305 
    (650) 725-0755 (fax)

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 2087

Links

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry; digital humanities; art

2025-26 Courses

All Publications

  • The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness Jenkins, N. Faber and Faber. 2024
  • Poetry and knowledge The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics edited by Greene, R., Cushman, S., Cavanagh, C., Ramazani, J., et al Princeton University Press. 2012; 4th
  • No cloud in sight: Larkin’s traumatic skies The Movement and modernism edited by Leader, Z. Oxford University Press. 2009
  • The Auden group Oxford dictionary of national biography edited by Cannadine, D., et al Oxford University Press. 2008; online edn.
  • Historical as Munich — Auden at 100: who is he now? Times Literary Supplement Mount, F. 2007: 12-15
  • “Running on the waves”: Pollock, Lowell, Bishop and the American ocean Yale Review McClatchy, J. 2007; 95 (2): 46-82
  • Lincoln Kirstein: the last tycoon Raritan Lears, J. 2007; 27 (2): 1-18
  • Looking into John Ashbery’s "a self-portrait in a convex mirror" [Wokó» ‚,Autoportretu’’ Johna Ashbery’ ego] Literatura na Ñwiecie [Warsaw] name, n. 2006; 7-8: 24-51
  • Auden in America Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden edited by Smith, S. Cambridge University Press. 2005: 39–54
  • Writing “without roots”: Auden, Eliot, and post-national poetry "Something we have that they don’t": British and American poetic relations since 1925 edited by Clark, S., Ford, M. University of Iowa Press. 2004: 75–97
  • Either or or and: an enigmatic moment in the history of “September 1, 1939” Yale Review McClatchy, J. 2002; 90 (3): 22-39