Nina Ellis

I am a final-year PhD candidate in American Literature at St Edmund’s College, where I am researching twentieth-century short fiction under the supervision of Professor Kasia Boddy. My doctoral thesis is a critical biography of the American short story writer Lucia Berlin. I am under contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to adapt this into a mainstream trade biography, LOOKING FOR LUCIA, which will be published in 2026.

Prior to PhD study, I gained my BA at Jesus College in 2011, and I was awarded my QTS and PGCE from the UCL Institute of Education in 2015 and 2016. I completed my MA in English and American Literature at UCL in 2018, achieving the highest Distinction in my cohort.

At Cambridge, I was Co-Representative to the OOC DTP Student Liaison Group from 2020 to 2022 and a Member of the Modern Language Association's Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities from 2021 to 2023. I was also Graduate Representative to the Faculty of English from 2019 to 2020, and from 2020 to 2021, I was Co-Convenor of the American Literature Graduate Research Seminar. I have given papers at many conferences, and in 2023, I was awarded the Chip Bishop Fellowship for promising first-time biographers by the international Biographers Research Network.

Meanwhile, I have published academic articles about Berlin in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice and The Cambridge Quarterly. My short stories and essays have appeared in Ambit, American Chordata, Carve Magazine, Granta, The Idaho Review, Litro, The London Magazine, The Oxford Review of Books, The Paris Review, 3:AM, the Mays anthology and elsewhere.