Dr Dmitri Levitin

History

Fifty-Pound Fellow since 2022

I'm a historian of pre-modern knowledge and its institutional settings. I've written primarily on Europe and its global interactions between the 15th and 19th centuries, but have recently ventured into the ancient world. Most broadly, I'm interested in intellectual change and its causes. I do not attribute such change to singular individuals or dramatic paradigm shifts, but rather to institutionalised communities. I believe that intellectual change needs to be understood as a totality: hence I’ve worked on the histories of science, the humanities, medicine, philosophy, orientalism, political thought, and more. I have just completed (for Penguin) a book called The Structures of Intellectual Evolution: a New History of Knowledge from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Age of Newton. It argues that intellectual history cannot be studied separately from the history of education, and that – unlike its political counterpart – intellectual change never proceeds in a revolutionary manner.

Links

Email: dmitri.levitin@history.ox.ac.uk

Personal Website

Research Areas

History of Knowledge

Intellectual History

History of Science

History of Humanities

History of Education

Selected Publications

"The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy"

(Cambridge University Press, 2022)

"Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science"

(Cambridge University Press, 2015)

- ed., with Nicholas Hardy, "Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities". Proceedings of the British Academy

(Oxford University Press, 2019)

ed., with Ian Maclean, "The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age"

(Brill, 2021)

"Newton on the Rules of Philosophising and Hypotheses: New Evidence, New Conclusions"

ISIS, 112 (2021), pp. 242–65

Teaching

Like all academics, the most important thing I do is teaching. As well as pre-modern history of knowledge, I also teach "bread and butter" early modern social history (global). It is very important to have a grasp of such social history before moving onto the intricacies of intellectual/cultural history – never neglect it.

If you are a student – anywhere in the world – please don't hesitate to contact me with queries or requests for copies of articles if you are unable to access them in any other way.

Awards

2026-7: Francis Bacon Medal

2025: Dan David Prize (world's largest history prize)

2016: Leszek Kołakowski Prize.

Public Life

I write fairly regularly for the Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement, and London Review of Books. The Literary Review, published monthly, is by far the best way to keep up with interesting recent history books, reviewed briefly and clearly by other historians - I recommend it highly. I have also recorded a few podcasts for Intelligence Squared and elsewhere.