James Nelson

Madison - James G. Nelson died at UW Hospital on Friday, April 10, 2015 after a brief illness. He was born in Covington, Kentucky, December 20, 1929 to Robert Elgin Nelson Sr. and his wife, Bess Jones Nelson. He was educated in the Lexington, Kentucky public schools where he graduated from Henry Clay High School in January 1948. He entered the University of Kentucky-Lexington where he graduated with a BA in Education in December 1952. Subsequently commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, he served on active duty as a Special Services officer at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, where later, as a First Lieutenant, he was an assistant to the Director of Education at the Air University Command headquarters, Maxwell. From 1955 to 1961 he served as a captain in the United States Air Force Reserves. On leaving active duty in the Air Force in 1954, Nelson entered the graduate department of English and Comparative literature at Columbia University from which he received his Ph. D. degree in 1961. During his last several years in graduate school, Nelson was a lecturer in English in Columbia College, Columbia University. On graduation, he joined the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in September 1961 where he was elevated to the rank of professor in 1969. He served as a member of the faculty at Wisconsin until he retired in 1995 as Professor Emeritus. During his academic career, he published five books, among them the influential The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Harvard University Press, 1971). During his years of teaching, he taught courses in both Romantic and Victorian literature while guiding many graduate students through their doctoral dissertations. As a scholar/teacher, he received numerous awards and honors, among them a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 1965, a Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship in 1985, as well as numerous research grants from the American Philosophical Society of America, the NEH, the ACLS, and grants and sabbaticals from the University of Wisconsin where he received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1994. For many years he served as a member of the Editorial Board of Victorian Poetry and was President of the Eighteen Nineties Society. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Kappa Delta Pi, and Phi Mu Alpha, as well as the Grolier Club, New York. In 2007, colleagues and members of his chosen fields of publication-the eighteen nineties and early modern literature - honored him with a volume, Bound for the Nineties: Essays in Literature and Publishing (Rivendale Press, 2006). He is survived by his brother, Dr. Jack L. Nelson of Lexington, Kentucky. He was preceded in death by his brother, Dr. Robert Elgin Nelson Jr. of Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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