William Nelson

William Nelson is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Campus (UTSC), where he has been affiliated since 2017. His research intertwines the history of the Enlightenment and French Revolution with themes of time, race, and biopolitics in the Atlantic world.

• MA and PhD, University of California–Los Angeles
• MA, University of Chicago
• BA, University of Wisconsin–Madison

His work interrogates the emergence of Enlightenment-era ideas about progress, colonialism, and the construction of temporal hierarchies, as well as the entanglement of racial theories with colonial practices. He has published extensively on Atlantic Enlightenment thinkers, linking figures like Thomas Jefferson and Rousseau to global frameworks of mobility and cultural exchange.

The themes of his recent publications (2024–2010) span:
• Revolutionary time and rapid progress narratives
• Early modern globalization's impact on European thought
• Racial engineering and colonial discourse
• Atlantic Enlightenment's unique characteristics
• Internal anthropology in post-revolutionary France

• Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize (2017)

As a Research Associate at Cambridge University's Centre for History and Economics, Nelson bridges transnational collaborations. His teaching and research extend to social theory, phenomenology, and experimental historical writing.