Hampshire College

Nathalie (Nell) Arnold, associate professor of fiction writing, received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University and publishes under the name N.S. Koenings.

N.S. Koenings’s first novel, The Blue Taxi , and her short story collection, Theft, were published by Little Brown and Company in 2006 and 2009.

Her fiction is usually set in global peripheries, where her diverse, multi-lingual characters search for safety and love in contexts sharply shaped by violence and Empire. Before dedicating herself to fiction writing and pursuing her M.F.A., she completed an M.A. and Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology with a focus on East Africa, popular histories of revolution, and politics and witchcraft. She has published anthropological work on Tanzanian politics and expressive culture and has worked for human rights in Africa.

Her current interests include difficult women (Helene Cixous, Clarice Lispector, Janet Frame), inflecting English with sounds and knowledge drawn from other cultures and languages, and the history and theory of narrative craft. In addition to fiction-related work, her areas of expertise include ethnography, Islam in Africa, global migrations, racialized histories, gender, and sexuality.

Affiliations
School for Interdisciplinary Arts

Recent and Upcoming Courses
IA-0280: Short Story Collections: fiction workshop (Spring 2014)
IA-0387: Creative Writing Concentrators' Seminar (Spring 2014)
IA-121T: The Practice of Fiction, for Beginners (Fall 2013)
IA-0258: Who's Telling This Story:point of view for fiction writers (Fall 2013)