Having received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, Nicholas Hudson taught at UBC for thirty-seven years between 1985 and 2023.  He remains active as a researcher and writer. He is the author of three monographs on Samuel Johnson that position this writer’s books, essays and conversation in the context of eighteenth-century culture, politics, philosophy, and religion. He also published a book at Cambridge University Press on the development of European thought about written language from the early modern period to the nineteenth century in response to Jacques Derrida’s thesis concerning the supposed subordination of writing to speech in Western tradition. His most recent book at Oxford University Press, The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660-1800 (2026), presents a new understanding of the development of the realist novel that departs in significant ways from the dominant historiography descending from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. In addition to these books, Hudson co-edited a volume of essays on eighteenth-century satire and has published over sixty essays on, among other subjects, the emergence of scientific racism, the evolving nature of social class, linguistic thought, authorship, and the development of aesthetic ideas during the Enlightenment. His most recent research concerns transforming ideas about the continent and people of Africa that informed the European imagination and politics during the age of the slave trade and abolitionism.

Selected Publications

Books

• Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth Century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 272 pp. Reissued in paperback, 1990.
• Writing and European Thought, 1600-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). xiii + 222 pp. Reissued in paperback, 2005.
• Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 290pp. Reissued in paperback, 2007.
• A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (London: Pickering & Chatto Press, 2013), 243 pp.
• Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-century Satire and its Legacy, ed with Aaron Santesso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 304pp.
• The History of Pompey the Little; or, the Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1752), by Francis Coventry (Peterborough and Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2008) Edited with an introduction by Nicholas Hudson. 272 pp.
• The Cultural History of Race during the Reformation and Enlightenment. Edited with an introduction by Nicholas Hudson. (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021).
• The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026), 224 pp.

Selected Essays

• “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,”Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247-64.
• “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves”: National Myth, Conservatism and the Beginnings of British Anti-Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 34 (2001): 559-76.
• “‘Hottentots’ and the Evolution of European Racism,” Journal of European Studies34 (2004): 308-32
• “Literature and Social Class in the Eighteenth Century,” The Oxford Online Handbook in Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.007.
• “Challenging the Historical Paradigm: Tories, Whigs, and Economic Writing, 1680-1714,” Eighteenth-Century Life 40.3 (2016): 68-88.
• “Creating the ‘Classless’ Author: Authorship and the Social Hierarchy, 1660-1800,” Textual Practice (2018), DOI:  1080/0950236X.2018.1467484
• “’Literature’ and Social Utility: The Genesis of a Modern Idea, 1780-1800,” Eighteenth-Century Studies2 (2020): 191-210.
• “Prose, Poetry and the Frontiers of British Discourse, 1660-1800,” Modern Philology 4 (2021): 537-556.
• “Johnson, Race, and Slavery,” in Greg Clingham (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 108-20.
• “Locke and Reactions to Locke, 1700-1800,” in The Cambridge History of Linguistics, ed. Linda R. Waugh, John W. Joseph, and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2023), 258-80.
• “Rediscovering Elizabeth Blower,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1 (2026): pp. 39–59.