Philip Nel
University Distinguished Professor / Graduate Faculty
Ph.D. 1997, Vanderbilt University
Website: https://philnel.com/
Email: philnel@ksu.edu
Office: English/Counseling Services Bldg. 103
Fields of interest:
Children's Literature; American Studies; Comics; Cultural Studies; Biography; Gender and Women's Studies.
Philip Nel's books include:
- Crockett Johnson's Barnaby Volume Five: 1950-1952 (co-edited with Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics, 2025)
- How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children's Classic (Oxford UP, 2024)
- Keywords for Children's Literature, Second Edition (co-edited with Lissa Paul and Nina Christensen, NYU Press, 2021)
- Crockett Johnson's Barnaby Volume Four: 1948-1949 (co-edited with Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics, 2020)
- Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017)
- Crockett Johnson's Barnaby Volume Three: 1946-1947 (co-edited with Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics, 2016)
- Crockett Johnson's Barnaby Volume Two: 1944-1945 (co-edited with Reynolds, Fantagraphics, 2014)
- Crockett Johnson's Barnaby Volume One: 1942-1943 (co-edited with Reynolds, Fantagraphics, 2013)
- Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
- Keywords for Children's Literature (co-edited with Lissa Paul, NYU Press, 2011)
- Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (co-edited with Julia Mickenberg, NYU Press, 2008)
- The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007)
- Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004)
- The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (University Press of Mississippi, 2002)
- J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2001).
Nel also wrote the Afterwords to Crockett Johnson's Magic Beach (Front Street, 2005) and Johnson's Harold's Imagination: 3 Adventures with the Purple Crayon, (HarperCollins, 2018), as well as the Introductions to The Cat in the Hat: 60th Anniversary Edition (HarperCollins UK, 2017) and The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff (New York Review Books, 2023). With Melanie Ramdarshan Bold (University of Glasgow), he co-founded and co-edits Oxford University Press' Children's Classics, Critcally series. Nel is also the author of over sixty essays, which can be found in a range of venues. See his CV for details.
An occasional guest on media programs and a popular invited speaker around the world, Nel has given invited lectures in the US, UK, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Singapore. His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Turkish, German, Greek, and Japanese.
Nel is Coordinator of the English Department's Concentration in Children's Literature and one of the webmasters of the English Dept. website. He is the recipient of the Balfour Jeffrey Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, a Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Award. He has won KSU's Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award and Stamey Award (for excellence in teaching). He also won the English Department's Donnelly Award and SAGE Teaching Award. How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children's Classic (2024) won the 2025 PROSE Award in Literature from the Association of American Publishers. Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (2012) won the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association's Rollins Book Award, and was named a Children's Literature Association Honor Book. His Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (2017) was one of the catalysts for Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ March 2021 decision to stop publishing six Dr. Seuss books that contain racist imagery.