David Armitage

Biography

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history, and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships in Britain, France, the United States and Australia. Among his 11 books to date are ‘The Ideological Origins of the British Empire’ (2000), ‘The Declaration of Independence: A Global History’ (2007), ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought’ (co-edited, 2009) and ‘The Age of Revolutions in Global Context’, c. 1760-1840 (co-edited 2010). 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. He is currently completing a study of the foundations of modern international thought, and also working on a history of ideas of civil war from Rome to Iraq, an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings and a co-edited volume of essays on Pacific history.