Hi there. My name's Nash. I’m a writer and academic-in-training; I used to be a journalist. This website made more sense three years ago, but I don’t want to give up the domain name, so here we are.
My first novel, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, comes out May 16, 2023 from The Overlook Press.
It’s about boarding school, and about Adderall, and about growing up. Click the green link to the left if you wanna learn more — or, better yet, just go ahead and pre-order it.
Also, subscribe to my Substack. I don’t write there as often as I’d hoped, but when I do I think it’s pretty good.
I’m a Ph.D student in the Program in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. I’m interested in how cultures of paranoia and narratives of conspiracy find their political and psychological shape online. In other words, I study conspiracy theories. More broadly, I’m interested in how the internet revises how we understand selfhood, citizenship, and political belonging. In my doctoral research, I’m hoping to draw on methods from sociology and psychology in order to imagine the contemporary internet as a discrete political space organized by unique and extrajudicial systems of power.
In June of 2019, I finished my M.A. in the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities, which is where I began thinking about questions of digital selfhood in the context of contemporary mass culture, particularly with respect to political culture in the United States. Of particular interest was the nihilism that seemed to be at the heart of so much online discourse. I spent my year at Chicago more or less up to my forehead in Marxist, psychoanalytic, and affect theory; I used the word “phenomenological” a lot. I wrote a thesis, advised by Professor Patrick Jagoda, on David Foster Wallace’s fanboys and detractors and what they tell us about cultural attachments in an increasingly mediated present.
(You can read my thesis here — but God, why would you.)
Before coming to Chicago, I was a correspondent for TIME Magazine based in Washington, D.C. I chiefly covered Congress, but spent a good amount of time traveling the country to write about trend, personalities, and events in American political life in the age of Trump. My final feature assignment for the magazine, published in May of 2018, was a profile of Beto O’Rourke. I also sometimes got to write about American popular culture. Iprofiled figures like the electronic music artist Porter Robinson and the comedian John Mulaney; occasionally, I reviewed albums for both print and web.
Before TIME moved me to D.C. in July of 2017, I was with them for two years in Hong Kong, where I covered politics and culture in East and Southeast Asia. I've reported on the drug war in the Philippines, the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong, the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, and teenage rappers in Indonesia. I write a lot of profiles: my story on Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, Hong Kong's top lawmaker, was Time's cover in September 2016.
Previously, I freelanced from New Delhi and Baltimore for The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. The former listed my September 2013 essay on electronic dance music and MDMA as an honorable mention on that year's "Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism." Read the stuff I've written, or at least a carefully curated fraction of it, by clicking on the link in the sidebar to the left (or from the dropdown bar if you're on your phone). I’m also an enthusiastic photographer, if formally and thematically very much an amateur; you can check that out too if you want.
I received my B.A. in May 2015 from Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, I studied in the Writing Seminars, the university's creative writing program, which awarded me the Stephen Dixon Literary Prize and the Louis Azrael Fellowship in Communications. I also wrote very angry essays for the JHU Politik, the campus political magazine.
You can reach me at pnashjenkins@gmail.com. I tweet at @pnashjenkins, but prefer Instagram:
