Nathan became a dedicated student of Catalan and Spanish culture after finding home in Barcelona, over 4500 miles from where he grew up in central Illinois. After earning a B.A. in Hispanic Studies and Educational Studies from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2015, he came straight to Indiana University, where he completed his M.A. in Hispanic Literatures in 2017. In his dissertation—“The Novel Bodies Politic in Spain and Catalonia”—he considers the ways in which the October 1, 2017 Catalan independence referendum has posed the problem of literature’s relation to the state (that is, of the novel to the body politic) by means of an examination of some of the most important works of Catalan literature of the last decade by Eva Baltasar, Sebastià Portell, and Marta Rojals. This literary analysis is complemented by a robust theoretical assemblage that “fits and starts” between gears bearing the names of Gilles Deleuze, Paul B. Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, and Marta Segarra, among many others. Nathan is also a published Catalan-English translator, and his full-length manuscript of pro athlete Kilian Jornet's Summits of My Life was published in 2018 by Velo Press. His hobbies include riding his bike, going to the gym, and thinking about hours-long seafood lunches in Sant Pol de Mar, Catalonia.
The College of Arts