David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton where he recently served as director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Born in New York in 1961, he was educated at Harvard and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1991. Before returning to Princeton in 2010 he taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty. A specialist in the history of France, he is the author of seven books, including The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2001), The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and most recently Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wilson Center, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science, and, as a Corresponding Fellow, to the British Academy. A former Contributing Editor of The New Republic, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Nation.

At the Library, Bell will be working on a new social and cultural history of the Enlightenment.

The American Library in Paris Visiting Fellowship was created in 2013 to nurture and sustain a heritage as old as the Library itself: deepening French-American understanding. The Visiting Fellowship offer writers and researchers an opportunity to pursue a creative project in Paris for a month or longer while participating actively in the life of the American Library.

The Visiting Fellowship is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.