David Armitage

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is currently a Senior Scholar of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and also an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

He was born in Britain and educated at the University of Cambridge 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 Australia, Britain, China, France, Germany, South Korea and the United States.

David Armitage is the author or editor of eighteen books, most recently Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). Among his earlier works are 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, Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), a New Statesman Book of the Year and one of the Chronicle of Higher Education's most influential books of the past 20 years. His most recent edited books are A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (co-ed., 2020), Oceanic Histories (co-ed., 2018), The Law of Nations in Global History (co-ed., 2017) and Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (co-ed., 2014). His next book will be a global history of treaties over the longue durée and he is also completing an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings His articles and essays have appeared in journals, newspapers and collections around the world and his works have been translated into fifteen languages.