Photo credit: Tammy Karin
Philip Nel is a University Distinguished Professor of English at a US university with an ambiguous relationship to academic freedom. He is a scholar of children’s literature and comics, an anti-racist educator, an activist, an enthusiastic amateur guitarist, an occasional guest on media programs, and a popular invited speaker around the world. He 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 the author or co-editor of 15 books and over 60 articles. His Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017), was featured in Time magazine, The Atlantic, TES, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune; the “Talk at Google” version has been viewed over 14K times. That work and the work of Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens (the duo behind The Conscious Kid) led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ March 2021 decision to cease publication of six Seuss books with racist imagery. In April 2025, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? was one of 381 books removed from the US Naval Academy Library, per order of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — best known for gossiping about war plans on Signal, committing war crimes, and his white-supremacist tattoo fetish.
Tales for Little Rebels (2008), co-edited with Julia Mickenberg, won favorable reviews from the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. His double biography, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (2012), received praise from the Wall Street Journal and Kirkus. Of his The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (2007), Newsweek wrote, “Philip Nel gives us a better grip on just why Dr. Seuss has so thoroughly captured the imaginations of several generations of readers–and the imaginations of their parents.” The Economist called his Dr. Seuss: American Icon (2004) “definitive” and “comprehensive.”
Photo credit: Tammy Karin
Nel’s most recent books are How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children’s Classic (Oxford UP, 2024), the first in “Children’s Classics, Critically,” a new Oxford University Press series he is editing with Melanie Ramdarshan Bold; the second edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2021), co-edited with Lissa Paul and Nina Christensen; and the fifth and final volume of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, co-edited with Eric Reynolds, with a foreword by director Ron Howard (Fantagraphics, 2025).
His latest essays are “Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon” (Oxford University Press blog, Oct. 2025), “Being Banned Is Not an Award” (Bookbird, Sept. 2025), “Small Book, Big Ideas: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Art of Imagination” (LitHub, Jul. 2025), and “Boredom, Blacklisting, or New Beginnings?: Why Crockett Johnson Ended Barnaby” (The Comics Journal, Feb. 2025). Many of his recent political writings can be found on the Indivisible MHK Substack.
Nel is also a PROSE Award winner and a Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Rollins Book Award winner, as well as a 2-time Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award winner, and a 4-time Eisner Award loser.
If you need a brief introduction, here is a cue card for you.
If you prefer a deep dive, his autobiographical proclivities will quickly exhaust your curiosity. For example:
- “A Manifesto for Children’s Literature; or, Reading Harold as a Teen-Ager” (Iowa Review, Fall 2015).
- “The Archive of Childhood, Part 1: Crayons” (blog post, Dec. 2014).
- “The Archive of Childhood, Part 2: The Golliwog” (blog post, Jan. 2015). Content warning: contains image of a racist doll.
- “The Archive of Childhood, Part 3: Earliest Memories” (blog post, Aug. 2018).
- Obituaries for his mother (1941-2023) and his uncle (1934-2019).
- Eulogies for his mother (video and text) and his uncle (video).
- “‘Well Paid for a Woman’: Gloria Hardman’s 50-Year Career in Computing” (IEEE: Annals of the History of Computing, July-Sept. 2022). His mother’s life in the field of computing.
- “For Mom” (blog post, May 2016). In praise of his mother, Gloria Hardman.
- “Running Out of Time” (Every Little Thing, January 2016). A guest post for his late friend Alison Piepmeier’s blog. The unnamed relative is his mother.
- “Delights” (blog post, Aug. 2019). Inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.
- “25 Years After; or, 10 Things I Learned at My High School Reunion” (blog post, May 2013)
If you enjoyed the photos on this page but wished they were sillier, here are some more ridiculous photos from the same May 2026 photo session.
Nel is represented by Stephen Barbara of InkWell Management.