David Armitage (born 1 February 1965) is a British historian who has written on international and intellectual history. He has been chair of the
history department and is
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
St Catharine's College, 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 was married to Harvard history professor
Joyce Chaplin.[5]