Eric M. Nelson

Eric Matthew Nelson (born August 13, 1977) is an American historian and the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Biography Eric Nelson was born in 1977 and grew up in New York City. According to Harvard Magazine, he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every week as a child.

Nelson attended Harvard College, where he was inducted to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated summa cum laude. While at Harvard, he was a regular columnist for The Harvard Crimson, where he often wrote about the parallels between history and modern day.

After graduating from Harvard, he attended graduate school in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar. and his grandparents were Holocaust survivors. He served as the Director of the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies from 2012 through 2015. He reads seven languages—English, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian, and German—and speaks four of them.

He has published four books since returning to Harvard and is working on a fifth that will explore theology and contemporary liberal philosophy.

Nelson has taught classes at Harvard that cover topics including Thomas Hobbes, the American Revolution, the English Revolution, Jewish political tradition, monarchy, republicanism, and the Enlightenment.

According to Diana Muir, Nelson is "one of a group of scholars engaged in the enterprise of re-evaluating the origins of modern political theory". According to Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Nelson's Hebrew Republic "demonstrates unforgettably that we need to understand piety to comprehend politics."

Nelson, along with Harry Lewis, Margo Seltzer, and Richard Thomas, wrote an op-ed expressing their opposition to Harvard's proposed policy to ban members of final clubs and other officially unrecognized social clubs from holding captaincies or receiving endorsements for top fellowships.

Nelson has been identified by his Harvard colleague Harvey Mansfield as a "self-professed conservative." He has taught an undergraduate course on "Conservatism and Its Critics," examining the work of Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ford Madox Ford, Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, Robert Nozick, and Tom Stoppard.

Books The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, (Cambridge University Press, 2004) The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, Harvard University Press (2010), which received the 2012 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and was a Choice outstanding academic title of 2010. 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). The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, October 2014) The Theology of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019)