Eric Nelson

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Eric Nelson is a professor of government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of political thought in early-modern Europe and America and on the implications of that history for debates in contemporary political theory. Particular interests include the history of republican political theory, the reception of classical political thought in early-modern Europe, theories of property, and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

During his year in residence, he will work on a study of the political thought of the American Revolution, provisionally titled “Thinking the Revolution: American Political Thought, 1763–1789.”

Nelson is the author of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010) and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as the editor of Thomas Hobbes: Translations of Homer (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2008) for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. His essays have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and edited volumes. Nelson received his AB summa cum laude from Harvard University (1999) and his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2002). He has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also been a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Marshall Scholar for graduate study in the United Kingdom.