Dmitri Levitin Awarded the Dan David Prize

Dmitri Levitin (All Souls College) has been awarded the Dan David Prize ($300,000), the world’s largest history prize.

Dmitri is a premodern intellectual historian and historian of knowledge who has published on the histories of scholarship, science, medicine, philosophy, theology, and European encounters with and perceptions of global societies. His books include Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015) and The Kingdom of Darkness (Cambridge, 2022), and he has just completed a trade book on the history of the humanities and the sciences from ancient Mesopotamia to 1700, arguing for a model of intellectual change that prioritises educational institutions. In 2024, he delivered the Dacre Lecture on the invention of the myth of the ‘Western Mind’. He is currently undertaking a collaborative research project on a remarkable new discovery: a notebook written by Isaac Newton’s university roommate. 

Previous winners of the Prize include Peter Brown, also of All Souls. 

Dmitri has contributed two Blogs to the CIH website: read them here and here.

To learn more about Dmitri’s work, visit www.dmitrilevitin.com.