David Bell was born in New York City in 1961. After studying at Harvard and the École normale supérieure (rue d'Ulm), he earned a doctorate in French history at Princeton. A specialist in the Enlightenment and the Atlantic Revolutions, he has taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities, where he was Dean for three years. Since 2010, he has held the Lapidus Chair in the History of Revolutions at Princeton. He is the author of seven books, two of which have been translated into French. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the British Academy, he directed the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton from 2020 to 2024. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and, in Europe, for Le Grand Continent.
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