[6] Nelson's The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638–1867 was named "an Outstanding Academic Book of 1992–1993 by Choice.
"[7] The book explored how eleven "Anglo-American authors constructed 'race'", including a study of The Last of the Mohicans and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and earned positive reviews.
[7] In 2006, she co-edited with Russ Castronovo a collection of essays entitled Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics.
[13] She has published numerous books, essay collections, and articles on U.S. literature and the history of citizenship and democratic culture.
[10] Nelson lives in Nashville where she is involved in a program that helps incarcerated women develop better decision-making skills and works with an innovative activist group fighting homelessness in the area.
[14] In her 2008 book Bad for Democracy,[2][15] Nelson criticizes presidentialism which she sees as worship of the presidency and federal politics to the exclusion of all else.
[11] Newspaper columnist David Sirota wrote "this culture of 'presidentialism,' as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the unitary executive that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government.
We form blogs, we write letters to the editor, we show up at Congress, we protest, we call, we lobby, we boycott, we buycott, we email our representatives, we find supporters, we get them moving, we grow the movement.