Darrin McMahon

Darrin M. McMahon is the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor at Dartmouth and the Chair of the Department of History. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, he is the author or editor of 11 books, including "Happiness: A History," 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; "Divine Fury: A History of Genius"; and "Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea," which won the 2024 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Association and is forthcoming in 7 translations.

McMahon’s writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Slate, The New Republic, Time Magazine, The Literary Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. From 2018–2023 he served as co-editor at the journal Modern Intellectual History and from 2014–2022 as the Vice-President of the Toynbee Prize. He is at work now on a history of lighting and illumination in the age of Enlightenment.