Eric Nelson

Nelson is Jewish, 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.

After earning his Ph.D., Nelson taught for another year at Cambridge before returning to Harvard as a Junior Fellow in 2004. By 2009, he was named the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government, and was granted tenure just one year later at the age of 32. In 2014, he was named the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government. He has also been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

After graduating from Harvard, he attended graduate school in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar. Nelson earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 2000, where he wrote a thesis on the Greek influence on English Republicanism. Two years later, he earned his Ph.D. from the same college at Cambridge.

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

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.