I am a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. My most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here.

My new project is tentatively entitled The Opening of the Western Mind: A New History of the Enlightenment, also to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History.

Another appeared in French History in 2024. In the spring of 2025, I was a Visiting Professor at the Collège de France, where I gave a series of lectures (in French) derived from the project. They can be found online here. 

I am also the author of six previous books, and the co-editor of three more. I have published academic articles in both English and French and contribute regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from the politics of education to modern warfare, contemporary France, the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of my publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. My Substack newsletter can be found here. My books have been translated into six languages, and other writings into several more. At the History Department at Princeton University, I hold the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offer courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, I spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 I served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. I am a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. 

This website provides information about my books, with a special section on Men on Horseback, and links to recent essays, book reviews, research materials, and the books' on-line appendices, plus some reviews of my work. 

I am happy to receive e-mail inquiries about my areas of expertise and responses to things I have written. I don’t always have time to reply in detail, but I do try to acknowledge polite and serious e-mail correspondence. That said, I don’t generally use research assistants, and I don’t take part in high school research projects. Applicants to the History Ph.D. program at Princeton interesting in working with me may wish to consult this information sheet. 

A full c.v. can be found here, and an academic genealogy here.

לֹא לָנוּ יְהוָה, לֹא-לָנוּ: כִּי-לְשִׁמְךָ, תֵּן כָּבוֹד--עַל-חַסְדְּךָ, עַל-אֲמִתֶּךָ