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Nick Van Kley is a PhD student in the Department of English and American Literature. He was born in the Upper Midwest and spent most of his childhood in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. After acquiring the perhaps dubious honor of graduating first in his high school class of 30, he attended Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan for two years, where he occasionally studied Physics. He left NMU for a year before enrolling at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he, undergoing a conversion experience of sorts, graduated with a BA in English. Since 2005, he has been studying 19th and 20th Century American Literature at Brandeis. He is currently working on a dissertation that examines the relationship between the origins of institutional Sociology in the United States and the Realist and Naturalist novels of the late 19th Century.

UWS 09-10 Instructors