Nigel Hatton, Ph.D.

(he/his), Founding Board Member

Nigel Hatton is an associate professor in the Literatures in English section of the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Merced. His research and teaching span the areas of literature and philosophy, human rights and literature, critical refugee studies, and narrative medicine. His scholarship has appeared in the James Baldwin Review, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought, Globalization in Literature, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, and other publications. He is a contributing author to Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (2022) and co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies Book Series from University of California Press. He has volunteered as an instructor, tutor, and consultant in California prisons since 2003 and occasionally teaches in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, and the Siebold-Collegium Institute for Advanced Studies (SCIAS) of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany and worked as a visiting professional in the President’s Chamber of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Dr Hatton’s research, service, and teaching center on human beings as variously conceived of, in, and between literature and philosophy, and the ways in which these ethical and aesthetic conceptions, their authors, their receptions, and their discursive and imaginative circulations across sameness and difference arch and gesture toward the interrogation and prevention of violence and hatred against and among material human beings in the immediate world. At the undergraduate level Dr. Hatton regularly teaches courses on “Human Rights & Literature,” “Literature & Philosophy,” “Existentialism & Phenomenology,” “Readings in Close Reading,” and “African-American Literature & Culture.” Recent graduate seminars include “Narrative Medicine,” “Modernity,” Cosmopolitanisms,” “Giving and Receiving Accounts of the Self,” and “Narratives of Death.”

Dr. Hatton received the dual Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature and The Humanities with a PhD minor in Political Theory from Stanford University, and master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Jesuit University of San Francisco.