PhD Student

American Literary Studies

Contact Information

Email: nbaldwin1@unm.edu
Office Location: Travelstead B31

Biography

Nicholas Baldwin was born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where his mother’s people are farmers, mechanics, truck drivers, welders, and homemakers.  He was educated in the private Catholic preschools of Syracuse and the public schools of Skaneateles, and later studied as an undergraduate in Spain and Denmark and as a graduate student in Sweden and England.  Formative moments between rural ways of life and international study inform both his research and artistic practice.

His research interests include 20th-century poetics, material culture, pragmatism, international pedagogy, bridging classroom discussion with practice, correspondences, and ephemera.  He critically engages with symbols and ideologies that shape American identity, especially within underrepresented literary forms: ephemera such as cookbooks and unpublished one-act plays.  Beyond traditional analysis, he explores how global forces and marginalized voices both contribute to and challenge dominant narratives in U.S. culture.  For example, the letter exchanges within artistic communities often reveal hidden networks of collaboration, sites of performance that extend into painting, multimedia, and other genres.  He has also worked as a research assistant to Holly George-Warren on her forthcoming biography of Jack Kerouac.

Nicholas is an editor of California Quarterly and a preliminary reader for Tupelo Press.  He has completed two summers interning with the Ojai Music Festival and has held residencies at the Ionion Center (Greece), Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), and Villa Lena (Italy).  He likes to travel for scholarship: in May 2024 he presented at ALA’s Beat Studies panel on the spontaneous poetics of Jack Kerouac’s letters, and in May 2025 he performed, along with three other scholars, an unpublished one-act play by Susan Glaspell under the direction of David Roessel at the University of Athens’ International Conference on Eugene O’Neill.  He has also trained in western papermaking at the Wells College Summer Book Arts Institute with Tom Balbo, and apprenticed in papermaking under Roberto Mannino and in typesetting with Michael and Winifred Bixler.  He also completed his 200-hour yoga teacher training in Ashtanga and Vinyasa on Waiheke, New Zealand, in December 2023.

His language and visual artworks have appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review, CIRQUE, Eunoia Review, Film Obsessive, Invisible City, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sandy River Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and World Literature Today.