Eric Nelson

Eric Nelson is 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. Nelson is the author of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard/Belknap, 2010), which received the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2010, and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge UP, 2004), as well as editor of Hobbes’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2008). His essays have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and edited volumes. Nelson received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University (1999) and his Ph.D. from The University of Cambridge (2002). He has been an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow, a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a British Marshall Scholar. He is currently at work on a study of the political thought of the American Revolution, as well as a long-term project on property rights and the theory of justice.