Nicholas Dew

Nicholas Dew
Contact Information
Address: 

Leacock, Rm 623
Department of History 855 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Phone: 
514-396-1982
Email address: 
Nicholas.Dew [at] mcgill.ca
Position: 
Associate Professor & Department Chair
Office: 
Leacock, Rm 623
Degree(s): 

D Phil (Oxford) 2000

Specialization by time period: 
1450 - 1800
Specialization by geographical area: 
Europe
Atlantic World
Biography: 

Nicholas Dew teaches early modern European and Atlantic history. His interests are in the cultural history of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the connections between colonialism and science, technology and medicine. His first book, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford University Press, 2009), maps the place of scholarly studies of Asia within the intellectual culture of France in the late seventeenth century. The book was awarded the Wallace K. Ferguson prize of the Canadian Historical Association in 2011.With James Delbourgo, he is the editor of Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, 2008), a collection of essays which began life as a workshop at UCLA's Clark Library. His current book project is a history of the trans-Atlantic dimensions of French science in the period 1670-1740.

Dew has held a SSHRC Standard Research Grant; a Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library; and an Inter-Americas Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Dew is a founding member (and former principal investigator) of the French Atlantic History Group (Groupe d'histoire de l'Atlantique français); and was a co-applicant in the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster "Situating Science"; as well as a Collaborator in the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative, "Making Publics". He has also been chair of the program in History and Philosophy of Science at McGill.

Along with Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, he is co-editor of the McGill Queen's University Press book series "French Atlantic Worlds."

Graduate supervision: 

Early Modern Europe (especially France, 1600-1800); Early Modern History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Francophone Atlantic World (1600-1800).

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