Assistant Professor Nikhil Bilwakesh holds a B.A. in Economics and English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Ph.D. in English with a Certificate in Film Studies from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He joined the faculty in Fall 2008.  

He is co-founder and co-director of the Alabama in Cuba interim program (2012), and he has taught in the Alabama at Oxford program (2010). 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

"W.D. Fard and the Unincorporated Margin of South Asian America." South Asian Review. 34:1 (2013). (forthcoming)

"Emerson's Decomposition: Parnassus."  Nineteenth-Century Literature.   67:4 (2013).  520-545.

"'Their faces were like so many of the same sort at home': American Responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857." American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism. 21:1 (2011). 1-23. (Honorable Mention, Pro-Quest/RSAP Article Prize, 2011).

"'This prospering country is your ornament': Emerson and the ‘Instructive’ Value of the Cosmopolitan Project."Nineteenth-Century Prose, 36:2 (2009). 77-112.

"Emerson, John Brown and Arjuna: Translating the Bhagavad Gita in a Time of War." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 55:1 (2009). 27-58.

"'Alias Jeremiah': The Pathetic Preachers of Oscar Micheaux." West Virginia University Philological Papers. Vol. 50 (2003): 33-41.

Essays, Reviews, and Other Writings

Review of Clemens Spahr, Radical Beauty: American Transcendentalism and the Aesthetic Critique of Modernity.  (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011).  Emerson Society Papers.  23:2. (Fall, 2012). 13+.

"Disserting Ellen."  New Orleans Review.  37.1 (2011): 140-145.

Review of Harold Abramawotz, Not Blessed.  (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2010),  Jacket2. (November, 2011)

Review of Mark Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams. (New Haven: Yale, 2006), "Letters in Canada 2006," University of Toronto Quarterly, 77:1 (Winter 2008). 335-337.

Review of Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord.  (Ithaca: Cornell, 2006), Nineteenth-Century Prose.  35:1 (2008).  250-254.

"Leo Percepied" and "Mardou Fox" from The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. Student's Encyclopedia of American Literary Characters. Ed. Judith Baughman and Matthew Bruccoli. New York: Facts on File, 2008.

Review of David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.  (New York: Knopf, 2005), Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1:2 (2007).  141 - 144.