William Allan Neilson

William Allan Neilson (March 28, 1869 - 1946) was a Scottish-American teacher, writer and lexicographer, in 1891 he graduated from the University of Edinburgh and received a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College from 1917 to 1939. Nilson was born in Doon, Scotland, and he emigrated to the United States in 1895, naturalizing on August 3, 1905. He taught at Brin Maura College from 1898 to 1900, at Harvard from 1900 to 1904, in Columbia from 1904 to 1906, and again at Harvard from 1906 to 1917. Nilson was the author of a number of critical works on William Shakespeare, Robert Burns and the Elizabethan Theater, editor of Shakespeare's Cambridge and Tudor publications (1906, 1911) and editor of Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition (1934). Less well known is his translation of the famous alliterative chivalrous novel of the late 14th century by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.