Rate My Professor Brian Nelson

Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French at Monash University, Melbourne, within the Faculty of Arts. He studied modern languages at the University of Cambridge and earned his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Early in his career, he served as lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and as senior lecturer at Aberystwyth University, Wales, prior to his appointment as Professor of French at Monash University in 1985. Nelson has held visiting fellowships at distinguished institutions, including New College, Oxford; Indiana University, Bloomington; the Salzburg Global Seminar; the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France; and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author, translator, editor, or co-editor of 28 books.

Renowned for his translations and critical studies of Émile Zola’s novels, Nelson has produced acclaimed translations for Oxford World’s Classics, including Germinal (2027), The Assommoir (2021), The Belly of Paris (2007), Earth (with Julie Rose, 2016), The Fortune of the Rougons (2012), His Excellency Eugène Rougon (2018), The Kill (2004), The Ladies’ Paradise (1995), and Pot Luck (1999). He has also translated Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2023) and Swann in Love (2017), and serves as co-editor and contributing translator for the new Oxford edition of Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, with four volumes published as of June 2026. Key authored works include Emile Zola: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2020), The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (Cambridge, 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola (2007), and Zola and the Bourgeoisie (Macmillan, 1983). A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) and Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques, he won the 2015 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation. Nelson was founding president of the Australian Society for French Studies, president of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (2007-2015), and editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies (2002-2020).