David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history.

He was born in Britain and educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University; before moving to Harvard in 2004, he taught for eleven years at Columbia University. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Britain, France, the United States and Australia. He currently holds an Honorary Professorship of History at the University of Sydney. In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal and in 2008 Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art”.

David Armitage is the author or editor of twelve books, among them The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013).