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Ashton Nichols

Ashton Nichols
Born Brooks Ashton Nichols
(1953-06-07) June 7, 1953 (age 63)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation Author, professor, naturalist
Years active 1984–present
Spouse(s) Kimberley A. Nichols (m. 1975)
Children 4

Ashton Nichols is the current Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainable Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature at Dickinson College. His interests are in literature, contemporary ecocriticism, Romanticism, and nature writing. Nichols teaches courses in Romanticism, 19th century literature, literature and the environment, and nature writing. He is especially well-known for his study of James Joyce's literary concept of "epiphany" and his coinage of the phrase "urbanatural roosting," an idea which links urban with natural modes of existence and argues for ways of living more lightly on the earth, for inhabiting our planet the way birds do, by altering our environments without harming those same environments.

Nichols graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. with high honors in Philosophy in 1975. As an undergraduate, he received a four-year full academic scholarship as a DuPont Regional Scholar and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was also selected for an Honors Program in philosophy, a program which allowed him to sit in on any class at the university and work individually with a separate tutor for each of three semesters: in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, and then to write an honors thesis in his final semester. On the advice of Cora Diamond, he attended University College London in from 1973 to 1974 to study philosophy. He served as a staff reporter for the Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star, where he received awards from the AP and the Virginia Press Association, and as an editor for the National Trust for Historic Preservation before returning to the University of Virginia for an M.A. and later a Ph.D. in English Literature, specializing in Romantic and Victorian literature. He spent time as a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University with John Beer. His Ph.D. dissertation, supervised by Robert Langbaum was entitled, “The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment.” It was later revised for publication with the same title, as his first book.


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