Biography

David Armitage, MA, PhD, CorrFRSE, FRHistS, FAHA, is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. In July 2012, he will begin a three-year term as Chair of the Harvard History Department.

Professor Armitage was born in Britain and educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University; before moving to Harvard in 2004, he taught for eleven years at Columbia University. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Britain, France, the United States and Australia. He currently holds an Honorary Professorship of History at the University of Sydney.

He is the author or editor of twelve books, among them The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and Foundations of Modern International Thought (in press). His most recently published books are two co-edited volumes, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (2009), also a TLS Book of the Year, and The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (2010), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His articles and essays have appeared in journals and collections around the world and his books have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Professor Armitage is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context, a Syndic of the Harvard University Press and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal for “conspicuously important work ... of a nature that involves communicating with the public” and in 2008 Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art”. In 2010, he delivered the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast on ideas of civil war from Rome to Iraq, the subject of his current major book. He is also working on an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings and a co-edited volume of essays on Pacific history.

Photo credit: Laura Mozes