David Armitage (historian)

David Armitage (born 1965) is a British historian known for his writings on international and intellectual history. He is chair of the history department and Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

Life and career

Armitage was born in Stockport, England and educated at Stockport Grammar School before attending the University of Cambridge where he read English as an undergraduate. After receiving his BA, he embarked on a PhD in English, initially intending to write his doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare's classical sources and the English neoclassical poets. During the course of his research, he became interested in the relationship between republicanism and empire in the works of John Milton and was increasingly attracted to the discipline of intellectual history. Funded by a Harkness Fellowship, he took two years off from his PhD to retrain as a historian at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.^[1] He was awarded his doctorate in history from Cambridge in 1992 with his dissertation The British empire and the civic tradition, 1656-1742, a study of the relationship between English literature and Britain's imperial ventures in the Americas.^[2][3]

After completing his PhD, Armitage remained at Cambridge until 1993 as a junior research fellow at Emmanuel College. He then joined the history faculty at Columbia University during which time he spent 2000 and 2001 at Harvard University on a fellowship. He joined the faculty of Harvard in 2004, later becoming the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History. In 2008 Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for "achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art".^[4] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Historical Society and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.^[4]

Armitage's writing has followed and helped define many of the major trends in the historical profession, from Atlantic history to the digital humanities to Big History.^[5] In addition, he has helped define new movements, particularly the international turn in intellectual history, considering the way European thinkers looked at the wider world. He has also produced works on conceptual history, including a book on the history of declarations of independence and a forthcoming volume on civil wars.

Armitage is married to Harvard history professor Joyce Chaplin.^[6]

Books

• The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000)^[7]
• Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (Ashgate, 2004)^[8]
• The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007)^[9]
• Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2012)^[10]
• The History Manifesto (with Jo Guldi, Cambridge University Press, 2014)^[11]

Edited volumes

• Milton and Republicanism (with Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Bolingbroke: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
• Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Ashgate, 1998)
• The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (with Michael Braddick, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
• British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (with Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice, Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Palgrave 2010)
• Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (with Alison Bashford, Palgrave, 2014)

References

External links

• Faculty page at Harvard University