Dutch Waterways 2026

Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor at Dartmouth College and the Vice-President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation.  He also directs the University of Chicago Book Series, The Life of Ideas, and is co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. Born in Carmel, California, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, he is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment  (Oxford University Press, 2001), Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books, 2013).  His work on happiness 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. McMahon 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); with Joyce Chaplin of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015); and is solo editor of the forthcoming volume History and Human Flourishing (Oxford, 2022).  He has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, the École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam, and his writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Washington Post, The New Republic, L’Histoire, Live Happy, and the Literary Review.  The recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon, Humboldt, and Guggenheim foundations, he is currently writing a history of notions of equality, under contract with Basic Books, New York, and a history of illumination in the age of Enlightenment.