Nancy McCampbell Grace

Nancy McCampbell Grace
Born	January 31, 1952
Occupation	Professor of English
Academic background
Education	PhD
Alma mater	Ohio State University
Academic work
Discipline	English Literature, Beat Generation Studies
Institutions	College of Wooster
Notable works	“The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature,” “Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation,” “Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers"

Nancy McCampbell Grace (born January 31, 1952) is the Virginia Myers Professor of English at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where she has taught since 1987. Grace is known as an established U.S. authority on the Beat Generation, with her research specifically on Jack Kerouac and women artists associated with the Beat movement. She has also written on Interdisciplinarity and women’s studies. Steven Belletto featured Grace in his article “Jack Kerouac, Sophistacte,” writing that Grace’s work on Kerouac “demonstrated that the writing’s seemingly simple surfaces conceal much more complex formal structures and aesthetic theories. Raven J. See covered Grace’s Breaking the Rule of Cool in her article “Fashion and Female Beat Identity in the Writing of di Prima, Johnson, and Jones. See wrote, “As Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace discuss in Breaking the Rule of Cool: ‘Women Beat writers dissented from gender assumptions of Beat and mainstream cultures; making their own use of the Beat aesthetics and culture by which they were colonized, they developed a subaltern's recourse, the art of being in between’ (21). As Johnson and Grace have illustrated, Beat women are a marginalized group within a marginalized subculture and they must doubly contend with the misogyny of the culture writ large but also within Bohemia.” In 2002, Grace and her research partner Ronna C. Johnson co-edited Girls Who Wore Black, which Isabel Castelao-Gómez referred to as “the first edited volume on Beat women writers with articles that bring academic emphasis on their two major genres: life and poetry.”

She is the co-editor of the Journal of Beat Studies published by Pace University Press, the co-editor of the Beat Studies book series published by Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press, and a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association. She is married to Tom L. Milligan.

Education

Grace received her Bachelor of Arts in History from Otterbein College (now University) in Westerville, Ohio in 1973, graduating with college honors. She then went on to become a certified paralegal at the Institute for Paralegal Training in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before going on to receive her Master of Arts from the Ohio State University in 1981. She received her Ph.D., also from Ohio State, in 1987 after completing her dissertation, "The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature."

Awards and Professional Memberships

• Winner of the Choice Top 100 Title in 2004 for Breaking the Rule of Cool and in 2007 for Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination
• Specialist Reader: PMLA, College Literature, Journal of Western Literature, Contemporary Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Clemson University Press, University of Delaware Press, MacFarland, and others
• Modern Language Association
• International James Joyce Society
• Beat Studies Association (founding member)
• European Studies Beat Network

Selected Bibliography

Books

• Von Vogt, Liz. 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1954, edited and published by Nancy M. Grace. Greater Midwest Publishing, 2008. {{ISBN|1590983017}
• Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, with Ronna C. Johnson. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.ISBN 1578066549
• The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Mellen, 1995.ISBN 0773489983
• Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, with Ronna C. Johnson. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.ISBN 0813530652
• Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2007. ISBN 1349734667
• Teaching Beat Generation Writers. New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming.
• The Transnational Beat Generation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 0230108415

Articles

• “The Beat Fairy Tale and Transnational Spectacle Culture: Diane di Prima and William S. Burroughs.” In The Transnational Beat Generation. Edited by Nancy Grace. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• “Diane di Prima as Playwright: The Early Years.” In Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation. Edited by Deborah Geis. London: Methuen, 2016.
• “Diane di Prima’s Loba: Troubling Classical and Buddhist Traditions.” In The Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition. Edited by Sheila Murnaghan and Ralph Rosen. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017.
• “Interview with Anne Waldman.” In The Transnational Beat Generation. Edited by Nancy Grace. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• “A Literary History of the Beat Generation.” In Cambridge Companion to Beat Literature. Edited by Steven Belletto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• “Margaret Sanger, Marie Curie, Maya Angelou, Marcel Duchamp, and Mary Belenky Teach a Women’s Studies Course: A Discussion of Innovative Interdisciplinary Approaches to Feminist Pedagogy.” In Innovative Interdisciplinary Teaching. Edited by Carolyn Hanes. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2002.
• “ruth weiss’s DESERT JOURNAL: A Modern-Beat-Pomo Performance.” In Reconstructing the Beats. Edited by Jennie Skerl. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.