David Armitage

David Armitage

Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History
David Armitage

David Armitage specializes in the genesis and transformation of international political thought in the early modern and modern era, with an emphasis on the ideological origins of British imperialism, declarations of independence, and ideas of civil war.

David Armitage, MA, PhD, FRHistS, CorrFRSE, is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard University. He is also an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

He was born in Britain and educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University and taught for eleven years at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 2004. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on five continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Britain, France, the United States and Australia.

Among his eleven books to date are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. His most recent 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 ChoiceOutstanding Academic Title. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections around the world and his works have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

He is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context, a member of the Board of Syndics of 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 a study of the foundations of modern international thought, an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings and a co-edited volume of essays on Pacific history.

 For full information on David Armitage see his history department website, here.