Steven Nadler (BA, Washington University, 1980; PhD, Columbia University, 1986) is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been teaching since 1988. He is also currently the director of the UW-Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Chicago, the École des haute études en sciences sociales (Paris), and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). From 2010 to 2015, he was the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
His  books include A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011); Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; 2nd ed. 2018, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award); Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2006); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God and Evil (Princeton, 2010); Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, “Jewish Lives” series, 2018); Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020); and The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm (Oxford, 2023). He is also the author, with his son Ben Nadler, of the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017). Among his forays into art history are Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003), which was named a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction; and The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World (Chicago, 2022). He has two books forthcoming in 2025: Why Read Maimonides Today? (Cambridge); and Spinoza Atheist (Princeton). In 2020 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.