Darrin McMahon

Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College, and formerly the Ben Weider Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University, where he taught from 2004-2014. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine; and Divine Fury: A History of Genius, published with Basic Books. He is also the editor, with Ryan Hanley, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2009), with Samuel Moyn, of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014), and with Joyce Chaplin, of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015). McMahon has taught as a guest professor at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New Republic, The Literary Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. A recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, McMahon is currently co-editor at the journal Modern Intellectual History and is at work now on book about the history of ideas of equality, and is writing another about lighting and illumination in the age of Enlightenment.