Nelson ’10 named Marshall Scholar

John Nelson ’10 has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship, the scholarship program announced Tuesday morning.

Nelson, who is from Dayton, Ohio, majored in history at Princeton and received certificates in Russian and Eurasian studies and Slavic languages and cultures.

Nelson is one of 31 American students, and the only Princetonian, selected for a Marshall Scholarship this year. The scholarships, awarded by the British government to up to 40 Americans each year, fund two years of graduate work in any subject at any institution in the United Kingdom.

Nelson plans to pursue two master’s degrees — one in art history at University College London and another at the University of Cambridge, where he will focus on German history and visual culture.

Nelson is currently studying on a Fulbright Scholarship in Ekaterinburg, Russia, at the A.M. Gorky Ural State University. His work focuses on American technology’s role in the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan, which was implemented by Josef Stalin in 1928 to stimulate the country’s economy.

“At this point, I am interested in broadening my area of focus and examining Germany’s role as the historical hinge of modern Europe,” Nelson said in a University statement. “The geopolitics of German-Soviet antagonism, or World War II for short, dictated the ground rules of the 20th century, but in that relationship there is a story much bigger than the barbarism of the war itself.” He could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Nelson’s senior thesis, titled “Bodies Under Socialism: A Somatology of the Soviet Union,” was described by his adviser, history professor Stephen Kotkin, as a “masterpiece.”

“It’s brilliant, a long, deep account of health care in Russia and the Soviet Union based on massive archival research and connecting pretty forlorn clinics with some great literature and novels,” Kotkin explained in an e-mail.

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Nelson won the Walter Phelps Hall Prize for his thesis, the highest honor given for a work in European history.

Kotkin cited Nelson’s energy and deep intellectual curiosity as the driving force behind Nelson’s extremely successful independent work.

As an undergraduate, Nelson received the Laurence Hutton Prize in History, awarded to the concentrator with the best record, and the William Koren Jr. Memorial Prize in History, given to the history major with the strongest junior-year record.

Caryl Emerson, chair of the Slavic languages and literatures department, said Nelson’s thesis was especially impressive considering how difficult it was to obtain the sources he needed.

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Emerson explained that many of Nelson’s sources came from provincial Russian archives that scholars did not have access to 15 years ago. When working with these kinds of archives, she continued, “you can’t rely upon people who know English, you cannot rely upon any digitalization of the holdings, you simply have to go in there and figure out what’s there.”

“He’s a real primary source scholar, and this is unusual for an undergraduate scholar,” she added.

Nelson was a member of The Daily Princetonian editorial staff and editor-in-chief of the Nassau Weekly.

“Mr. Nelson is what you get when the Energizer Bunny is cross-bred with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then goes out and reads a lot of Dostoyevsky,” Kotkin said. “Even at Princeton I don’t think you see that.”