John William Nelson

John Nelson is a professional historian, teaching as a tenure-track faculty member at Texas Tech University. He specializes in the history of early America, with an emphasis on the borderlands of Indigenous North America and the colonial Atlantic World. His research examines the ways ecology and geography shaped the terms of cross-cultural interaction between Native peoples and European colonizers from first contact through the early republican era of the United States.

Dr. Nelson earned his B.A. at Gettysburg College in 2013 and his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2020. His recent book, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent, explores how a particular local landscape along Chicago's continental divide influenced colonial encounters from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. You can read more about the book and its forthcoming publication here.

At Texas Tech, Professor Nelson offers courses in United States history, Colonial America, the American West, Atlantic World, and Native American history.

Nelson has published work on the American West, Indigenous America, the American Revolution, and the environmental history of the Great Lakes region.