In the artificially-lit basement of East Pyne, Professor Jeff Nunokawa is hurtling at breakneck speed through a lecture about Francis Bacon. It’s the first day of class for English 203: The Essay, and Nunokawa is on a mission to convince the fifty-odd students watching that there’s a lot to learn from Bacon’s seventeenth-century discourses on truth and anger and love. He’s in constant motion, slashing an arm through the air, shaking his head vigorously, absolute conviction echoing through his entire body.
Even the initially sleepiest of the students sits up straight when Nunokawa first breezes into the room, already exuberant, exclaiming hello to those he recognizes. The rest wear expressions that fall at varying points between utter bemusement and mild awe, eyes locked on the agitated figure arguing that the essay form is inherently connected with the pursuit of truth, cramming an improbable volume of words into each breath, almost yelling when he arrives at a particularly striking point, never slowing until, at last: a pause. Furious huffs. Then, he barrels onward again.
Halfway through, he singles out a sweater-attired upperclassman in the third row, who turns slightly pale at the attention: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young F. Scott Fitzgerald?” Everyone turns to look. I surreptitiously Google “f scott fitzgerald” and click on the Images tab. He’s not wrong.
This is Jeff Nunokawa: beloved Princeton professor, scholar of English literature, legendary campus personality. His hair is graying; he can’t stand much taller than five-foot-six. He wears shorts even in the dead of February, paired one time with electric blue knee-high socks. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he delivers impassioned lectures on long-dead literary giants, from Vladimir Nabokov to Samuel Johnson. He sits on top of a desk, kicks his legs, asks if anyone has an energy drink and, upon acquiring a brightly-colored Bang energy from a student in the second row, chugs it. Papers rustle as he flings his notes into the air. He scribbles the names of philosophers and movie stars alike on the board, writing so frantically that the chalk snaps mid-word. He pauses halfway through a sentence about sex and Bacon’s “Of Truth” (more connected than you’d ever expect, he’ll have you know – there’s a downright dirty allusion three lines in) to point at the back of the room and shout a student’s name, as if reminding himself.
I catch at least a couple of bewildered looks that first day, students casting around the classroom for confirmation – what the hell is going on? Nunokawa is more aware of these reactions than his wholly un-self-conscious manner might suggest, describing his own personality as clownish.
“It’s a way I have of getting through to people,” Nunokawa tells me. The class is held in a relatively small lecture hall, allowing him to see every face. It’s common for him to call on “Scott” or another student – he seems to have learned nearly every name. He’s not bothered with over-formality; that’s part of how he cultivates an interactive classroom, encouraging students to ask questions or even argue with him. “A certain amount of sass is really good. It allows people to engage in a way that is direct. It emboldens them.”
When I suggest that it lets students let their guards down, he nods.
“Totally.”
Nunokawa in his office. Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.
It’s a rainy day in April, the tail end of multiple days of terrible weather, and I’m meeting Nunokawa in his office in McCosh. “I almost tried to reschedule this,” he tells me. “I’m not going to say I’m not myself today, but I’m at the lower end of the spectrum.” He’s more subdued than in class, but a subdued Nunokawa still operates at a higher frequency than most people, full of vivid anecdotes and winding literary asides.
His office looks like the last stronghold of a bibliophile preparing for doomsday. Books are crammed tightly into a towering shelf that fills an entire wall, stacked in piles feet tall on the floor, heaped inexplicably in a shopping cart. There’s a neon yellow children’s sized jersey with “Aguilas” printed across the chest dangling from the highest shelf. What little wall space not taken up by bookshelves is papered with posters, from Act Up slogans to Ingres paintings to an advertisement for a Friedrich Schiller talk on October 16th, 2005. Somehow, he knows where everything is, weaving between the stacks to snag a book he wants to show me. There’s a sense of certainty, and of an almost unfathomable depth of knowledge. He’s the same way in class, shutting his eyes tightly to recite stanzas of poetry by Auden and Keats or to quote rambling verses of the Bible.
Nunokawa has always had this passion. Born in Oregon in 1958, he lived there until he was nine before moving to Hawaii for one year, back to Oregon for two more, and returning again to Hawaii in 1969. The last move would be permanent for the rest of his family, but one that would for him only last until 1976. He felt that he couldn’t escape quickly enough.
“My brother would say, ‘Jeff never lived in Hawaii, he just stayed here for a while,’” Nunokawa recalls. One draw of the mainland was the promise of education. “I felt this enormous enthusiasm about the things I read, but I would often quote these things and people weren’t interested,” he says. A gap existed between what he cared about and what his high school friends cared about, a disconnect he was acutely aware of but didn’t know how to bridge.
Internal strain further spurred him to leave. The series of back-and-forth moves were the manifestation of familial drama, the deterioration of his parents’ marriage. The town in Oregon where Nunokawa grew up, Lake Oswego, was exceedingly white, as was his mother. Hawaii, meanwhile, was majority nonwhite, a political landscape his Japanese-American father wanted in on.
His parents’ marriage was the tentative forefront of a new time – interracial marriage wouldn’t be legalized nationally in the United States until years later, in 1967. Nunokawa believes his family was an embodiment of that “midcentury dream of racial integration,” living what was for others only an abstract idea. At the same time, that dream left an enormous pressure on the marriage. His father had a complicated relationship with race; his resentment of white people was occasionally displaced onto Nunokawa’s mother. This tension only grew. He recalls: “When I was young, I don’t remember my father ever talking about race. By the time we moved back to his home, I don’t remember him talking about much of anything else.”
In 1969, Nunokawa was 11 years old. He had just moved back to Hawaii, and parts of his own identity began to feel untenable. “I knew I was very white-identified because of my mom, who was very white, and I knew that I was gay. My father, I was sure, knew both those things too,” Nunokawa says. He felt like he was waiting for something to break. He knew he had to get out, and he knew how he was going to do it. His senior year of high school, he sent in applications to colleges on the East Coast.
When Nunokawa left for Yale in 1976, he’d been sure it was the right decision. Upon arriving in New Haven, though, he found the adjustment bracing. The East Coast, at the time, was a long way from Hawaii in more than just a geographic sense: the distance was cultural, financial, technological.
“It was a bigger culture shock than I knew it would be,” he says. He’d left an insular community in Hawaii and suddenly been thrust into a world of privilege and intellectual heritage. That first semester was difficult. For the first and last time in his life, Nunokawa found himself homesick. He credits part of his adjustment to the friends he made, the community he found.
Most of all, though, his teachers loom large in that delicate period of metamorphosis. A high-school debater, Nunokawa came to college certain he was going to become a lawyer. His freshman year, though, he was placed into a lower-level English class taught by Bart Giamatti. Giamatti would later become the university president, but that year, he was teaching English 15. He was a strict, conservative guy. The students were Mister and Miss; they had assigned seats. Hand-raising was required.
And yet, what has stayed with Nunokawa all these years is the sense that the gruff professor treated his students with great respect, raising them up to the level of equals. He finds himself thinking about one story in particular. A student had interrupted an intricate argument Giamatti was making, informing him that a quotation he’d based his lecture upon was actually incorrect. The class was composed of students from underfunded public high schools, the one you took if you didn’t place into higher-level English. The interrupting student, a “sort of rambunctious young lady from east LA who wore a lot of knit hats,” in Nunokawa’s words, hadn’t been someone he’d expected would be taken seriously. But in that room, she was.
Giamatti had looked miffed, paging through the text he was analyzing. “But finally, he stops, and he looks up, and he says: ‘Miss Rodriguez, you’re right. Kids, we’ll take our smoke break early, I gotta regroup.’”
Nunokawa is still struck by Giamatti’s willingness to concede he was wrong. “To be seen that way, to be honored that way, I think that was the most amazing thing he taught.” He’ll speak glowingly of all the teachers he’s had: a political science professor he’d been terribly intimidated but who had kindly asked him if he had Thanksgiving plans, a professor who gave his paper the feedback that she might just have misunderstood it, which he calls “very modest, because she knew everything.”
He wants to echo that grace he received for his own students. “I care enormously about the things I’m teaching,” he says. “But I also care a lot about the activation you can do for a student, and so much of it is about respect.” That’s why he’ll thank a preceptee who offers an incorrect reading of Oscar Wilde, or why he’s thrilled when students come to his office hours and tell him they have no clue what Samuel Johnson is saying in Rambler No. 8.
“I’ve been really lucky to be able to trust my teachers, and I want to be someone whom students can trust, no matter how crazy I am,” he says. And yes, he’s aware some of them do think he’s losing his mind. “I mean it as a way of letting people in, not keeping people out. Because every teacher I’ve known has done some version of that for me.” His goal is to pass that feeling forward.
Chaotically-stacked books clutter Nunokawa’s McCosh office. Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.
At the end of that freshman-year English class, Nunokawa remembers Giamatti telling him he’d done well, and suggesting that he consider graduate school. He hadn’t even known it was an option before that moment. All he’d known was how much he loved the close-reading they did in class, uncovering something new. He still gets that feeling now, like he’s being given a key to understand everything in the world. “I never looked back,” he says.
So he graduated from Yale. He did his PhD at Cornell. And, in 1988, he came to Princeton.
He taught as a preceptor, then a co-teacher, and eventually, he got his own classes, somewhere around 1991 (he can’t quite remember the exact year). First was a seminar on AIDS, then a course on gay literary studies, then a 19th century novel class that’s been running ever since.
The Essay has become a signature class of his. He initially proposed it as an addition to several existing introductory courses in the English department, primers on poetry and fiction and drama, an almost tongue-in-cheek idea. He’s well aware that the topic sounds far from interesting. “No one likes the idea of writing a freaking essay,” he says. “Just to start there, with how un-effing-fun the essay form is, and why? Largely, it’s institutional.” He’s right – the word immediately brings to mind a dull, academic task conflated with grading.
But Nunokawa will claim that there’s something uniquely compelling about the essay as literary form, that it bridges the gap between the drier realm of the academic and the more accessible world of the conversational. His syllabus traces across disciplines, dipping into economics and sociology and film. The themes he proposes in lecture almost always deal with a balancing act: concealment and revelation, subjectivity and objectivity, the written and spoken word.
During a February lecture on George Kennan, Nunokawa highlights the diplomat’s attempt to define a middle ground between objective, intellectual reports and intimate, diary-like confessions. Kennan’s solution is to make the self present only by implication, for the writer to reveal something about themself by writing about a separate subject.
This theme has even made itself relevant in his own life. In 2015, Nunokawa put out a book of essays. In it, he compiled hundreds of short Facebook posts he’d published over several years, reflective responses to poems or literary excerpts that earned him a large following. He looks back with regret, though, worrying that the writing became too revelatory, too much about him and not enough about the texts he was responding to. “I’m not proud of that book. It could have been something real,” he says softly.
He’s writing a new book, nearly ten years later. The book will be about his parents, both of whom have passed away. When Nunokawa thinks of his mother and father now, he’s struck by how young they seem. “They had such responsibilities, and they had such hopes, and my father was so naïve, and himself such a plaything of history,” he reflects. The book is about that tenuous time, the arc of his parents navigating it.
It’s also an attempt at redemption, à la Kennan. This new volume is trying to strike that balance, strip the story of the merely personal. He’ll place his parents in the foreground. Nunokawa himself will rarely appear in the story, but readers might find that they learn something about him anyway.
Now, at the age of sixty-five, Nunokawa finds himself idolizing modesty. He’s drawn to the quiet humility he saw in his professors, people who didn’t live glamorous or flashy lives, just showed up, day in, day out.
He recognizes that lifestyle as a familiar one. His parents were the same way. He calls his childhood “not a happy world, but a thrilling one,” with moments of greatness. His parents were at their best when they were “proud, but modestly so, quietly so.” They didn’t announce their beliefs. They lived them. He’s chasing that.
This ideal might seem at odds with his lectures, which are almost a performance, one where he’s “on” the entire time. He’ll reference his therapist or his relationship with his father as he breaks down essays by Erving Goffman or Mary McCarthy. Nunokawa worries that the lectures become too personal sometimes, the same anxiety that infuses his regret about the first book. He wishes occasionally that he spent his younger years writing more purely academic essays, a style reminiscent of his teachers and parents.
“I miss the modesty of that mode. That self-transcendence,” he says. “I just feel that I put myself out there too much.” It’s not necessarily that he’s afraid of being vulnerable, more that he doesn’t want his “thinking or writing or teaching – most of all my teaching – to be too much about myself.”
That’s his biggest fear, the one that leaves him feeling anxious when he drinks too much coffee or wakes up on a bad day. Nunokawa believes, though, that there’s a point to the performance. “I go too far sometimes, maybe even a lot, but I feel like my students can see that I’m trying to get something right, to show how these books, these words, can illuminate our lives.”
It might just be, actually, that Nunokawa’s outlandish lectures are their own form of self-transcendent humility. You won’t see students looking intimidated or self-conscious in the classroom; how could they, when he’s swigging Red Bulls and talking about old movie stars and sweating through his shirt? They’re freed from fear to raise their hands and say they don’t understand his claims, or even challenge him.
Before lectures, he sends out emails with important passages from the texts. The subject lines are delightful, often in all-caps and punctuated with dozens of exclamation points, referencing Melville and T.S. Eliot with the same ease as they nod to 1930s American gangster films. One from March reads: “I AM AWARE THAT I RENDER MYSELF RIDICULOUS WITH THESE MESSAGES, BUT PEDAGOGY MUST TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER FOOLISH AND FUGITIVE NOTIONS OF DIGNITY.” There’s something resonant in the hasty message: Nunokawa isn’t afraid of making a fool of himself. He’ll do it a thousand times over if it means he can reach his students, make the old writings clear to them.
“That’s a joy for me. It’s maybe the greatest joy of my life,” he says.
Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.
From 2007 until 2017, Nunokawa was the head of Rockefeller College, one of Princeton’s residential colleges. He says he was addicted to it. “When I was in that role, literally every person I ran into, I knew. I was really all in. Twenty-four seven. I did that, and it did me.” You can still see some of it in how he runs his lecture, the unending enthusiasm, the desire to know every student. His favorite part of those years was being able to sit down at random with a student and, as he puts it, “have a real conversation.”
He’ll still wander into the dining hall from time to time. His goal is always to disrupt the student from answering the classic questions – What’s your major? Where are you from? – in the same way they’ve done uncountable times before. Last week, he steered a chat with a first-year to religion and faith within five minutes. “We got deep fast. Because I have nothing to lose and neither did he. He didn’t know that at first,” he says. Those conversations where each person’s guard is down, where trust abounds, are important to him.
Nunokawa is all in during lectures, his arms flailing, his voice sounding at an urgent staccato. When you’re speaking one on one with him, though, he’s somehow more present than ever. His words still spill out impossibly quickly, but when he reaches something that he really cares about, he slows down. He looks at you. His voice gets softer, like he cares – and he does. He knows how powerful it is to grant another person the respect of truly listening to them, to erase the often-stark line between teacher and student. As he’ll tell you, that moment where that divide fades away is where the magic lies. “That’s where things get real. That’s where things get beautiful.”