John Hay

John Hay is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature. Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, he earned a PhD in English from Columbia University, where he received a Bancroft Dissertation Award. His first book, Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the ways in which U.S. writers imagined the nation’s explosive potential. He is the editor of Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which collects two dozen essays on the subject ranging from the colonial era to our contemporary moment. Hay's essays have appeared in books such as The Oxford Handbook of Jack London (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture (Bloomsbury, 2020), and New Approaches to Bob Dylan (University Press of Southern Denmark, 2020). His writing has also appeared in Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Desert Companion. He has received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.