Bio

William Max Nelson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He teaches undergraduates at the Scarborough campus and graduate students downtown at the St. George campus.

His academic work combines intellectual history and the history of science, focussing on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged in the eighteenth century. The geographical focus of his academic research is France, though he is interested in the Enlightenment as a whole and in the relationship between France and its colonies, particularly those in the Atlantic world.

Some of his academic writing can be found here https://utoronto.academia.edu/WilliamMaxNelson

More about his academic work can be found here http://www.history.utoronto.ca/william-nelson?ptype=all-faculty

Other research and teaching interests include the development of early modern globalization, the life sciences, social theory, the phenomenological tradition, modernist prose, and experimental forms of writing history.