Elliott Niblock

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Elliott has traveled widely to pursue his career in higher education. He moved first to St. Paul, Minnesota to attend Macalester College, with brief stints abroad at the Goethe Institute in Berlin, as well as King’s College in London. Focusing his studies on Medieval Christianity, he earned a BA from Macalester with majors in History and Religious Studies in 2009. Next stop: Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he studied Philosophy of Religion at Harvard Divinity School, serving as a non-resident tutor for the undergraduates of Eliot House; he received an MTS (Master of Theological Studies) from HDS in 2012. Following this brief tenure at Harvard, Elliott went out west to Missoula, Montana. In 2014, he completed his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. While at UM, he taught collegiate writing for two years, predominantly the required freshman composition class Writing 101, but also one section of a Creative Writing Poetry Workshop.



From 2014 - 2018, Elliott worked full time as a freelance writer and editor, executing a wide variety of writing contracts. Some of the projects to which he contributed writing include The Manifesto in Literature, Histories of Ordinary Life in Totalitarian Regimes, the Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Legal Issues Across the Globe, and Immigration and Migration In Context, among others. Many of these writing projects are textbooks geared for a target audience that overlaps advanced high school classes, as well as introductory college courses.



In the fall of 2018, Elliott joined the PhD program in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, with research foci in Religion and Literature, Modern Jewish Thought, and the Philosophy of History. He currently serves as a Teaching Assistant in the Religious Studies Department at UVA, teaching discussion sections on a wide variety of Religion courses. In addition, he also works as a Writing Tutor at UVA's Writing Center, tutoring both undergraduate and graduate students, with topics that range from brainstorming ideas and writing strategies for first-year college essays, to polishing up the very final draft of research grant proposals for recent PhD recipients applying to post-doc positions. In his free time, Elliott enjoys traveling, hiking, biking, and watching both football and football (soccer)