Laura Nelson Creates Spaces for Students to Gather and Study

Laura Nelson can trace her interest in different forms of learning back to high school. One of her teachers held informal study groups after school in which students read and discussed books together. The experience made an impression on Nelson, who decided to recreate a form of these discussions as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia with several friends. For what eventually became known as flash seminars, they invited professors and classmates to lead a single seminar on any topic of their choice. In the first few years, they organized over 100 seminars that were free and open to the university and Charlottesville community. Fifteen years later, the seminars continue at UVA and Nelson has created similar opportunities at Princeton.

Nelson says being part of this collective project was truly formative and inspired her research focus. “It just got me really interested in all different forms of education,” she says. That through line stayed at the core of Nelson’s work as she taught at a six-student college in Gustavus, Alaska, and then at the tiny Deep Springs College, located on a cattle ranch in California. In her current role as an assistant professor of English, she continues to research and create experimental sites of learning.

Quick Facts

Title
Assistant Professor of English

Time at Princeton
1 year

Recent Class
Introduction to Media Studies

Mikel Casal

Nelson’s Research: A Sampling

After School

Nelson is currently working on a book titled After School about examples of alternative education models. She’s researching 10 cases from the 1920s through the 1980s, including sculptor Augusta Savage’s basement art school in Harlem in the 1920s and the California Labor School which opened in the 1940s and offered classes on nights and weekends. These models of education relied on collective organizing and creativity, Nelson says. Her goal with the book is to capture the history of these nontraditional educational environments and also serves as a resource for anyone interested in creating similar spaces of learning “with whatever materials or resources are at hand,” she says.

Learning Reimagined

For two years beginning in 2023, Nelson co-organized Place Settings, a lecture series in Los Angeles in which artists, writers, and academics gave talks at different film sets around the city. Nelson says she hopes to bring the concept to the East Coast. She’s also collaborating with NYU professor Zachary Samalin and Andy Hines, interim director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore, to organize a “Winter School” offering free night and weekend classes, available to anyone, as part of an upcoming exhibition by Samalin about labor schools. These projects “are really aimed to bring lots of different kinds of people together,” Nelson says.

Media Studies

This year, Nelson received a grant from Princeton’s 250th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, which supports faculty members creating new or reimagined courses. Nelson plans to use the grant to expand the way she teaches her spring semester English class, Introduction to Media Studies, by inviting artists and scholars into the classroom. Instead of just giving traditional lectures, Nelson would like to experiment with the structure of classes and give guests the freedom to perform, screen material, and more. “I am going to be running a set of experimental lectures,” she says. Chia Amisola, an artist and technologist, and the duo behind the art collective Shanzhai Lyric are among her planned guests.