Penn Postdocs in the News: Malcolm Nelson, U.S. Army veteran, connects service to research on empathy in ancient Greece

Malcolm Nelson has always loved history—specifically antiquity and military history. He was intrigued by how foreign and “radically different” these topics seemed from his life growing up in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Now a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Penn’s Department of Classical Studies, Nelson’s path began with a desire to understand and empathize with people from different periods. That led him to study classics in college but also to a very different environment from humanities classrooms: the military. As a recent graduate he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2009, moved by empathy for the Iraqi and Afghani people. Nelson worked in intelligence gathering in Iraq and counterintelligence in Germany until 2012.