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. 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); and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020). 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). Forthcoming in 2024 are The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm (Oxford) and Why Read Maimonides Today (Cambridge). He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, for Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003), and in 2020 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.