Assistant Professor
D Phil (Oxford) 2000

Nicholas Dew teaches early modern European history. He came to McGill in 2004 from Cambridge University, where he was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Research Fellow of St Catharine’s College. His interests are in the cultural history of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the history of science, travel, and oriental studies. His first book, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford University Press, 2009), maps the place of scholarly orientalism within the intellectual culture of France in the late seventeenth century. His current book project is a history of the trans-Atlantic dimensions of French science in the period 1670-1760. With James Delbourgo, he edited Science and Empire in the Atlantic World(Routledge, 2008), a collection of essays which began life as a workshop at UCLA's Clark Library. Dew has recently been a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, and an Inter-Americas Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. In 2009, he was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for his project "Science and Empire in the French Atlantic World".

Dew is a Co-Applicant in the French Atlantic History Group; a Co-Applicant for the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster "Situating Science"; and a Collaborator in the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative, "Making Publics". He also currently chairs the McGill History and Philosophy of Science programme.

Nicholas Dew supervises graduate students in Early Modern Europe (especially France), Early Modern Science, and the French Atlantic World. Undergraduate courses include Hist-214 Introduction to European History; Hist-390 Eighteenth Century France; Hist-350 Science and the Enlightenment; Hist-365 Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries; Hist-595 Honours seminar on Early Modern Europe; HPSC-500 Seminar in History and Philosophy of Science.

Personal Website
Version française
Nicholas Dew CV [.pdf]