David A. Bell

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions in the History department at Princeton, where he is also the Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center. He is a historian of the early modern Atlantic world, with a particular interest in the political culture of Enlightenment and revolutionary France.

His most recent book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, is a study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bell is also the author of six previous books, which have won prizes from the Society for French Historical Studies, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the American Historical Association, and have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Turkish. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship.

Bell has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton and previously was on the faculty at Yale and Johns Hopkins.