David Bell (historian)

David Avrom Bell is an American historian specializing on French history.

Biography

David Bell was born into a Jewish family New York City in 1961. He is the son of noted sociologist Daniel Bell and Pearl Kazin Bell (Alfred Kazin's sister).^[1]

He completed his A.B. in History and Literature at Harvard University in 1983, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his M.A. in History in 1987 and his Ph.D. in 1991, both at Princeton University. He then taught at Yale University from 1990 to 1996; Johns Hopkins University from 1996 to 2010, where he was Dean of Faculty beginning in 2007; and at Princeton University since 2010.^[2]

Bell has regularly taught undergraduate survey courses on European history from 1492 to the present and on the French Revolution. He has taught advanced undergraduate seminar courses on the art of narrative history and the history of the French empire in the Americas. He has taught also graduate courses on early modern France, nationalism, war, the first French empire, on the Enlightenment, and the way that thinkers have understood the Enlightenment over the past quarter-millennium.

He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic and a regular contributor to several other magazines, including The London Review of Books and Slate.

Books

• The First Total War
• The Cult of the Nation in France
• Lawyers and citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Awards

• 2002 the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association ^[3]

References