Biographies and Photos

David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis joined the NYU faculty as professor of history on September 1, 2003.  His field is comparative history with special focus on 20th-century US social history and strong interests in 19th -century Africa and 20th-century France.  In October 2003, Mr. Lewis was named Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History at NYU.

A 1956 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk University, B.A., in history and philosophy, he holds graduate history degrees from Columbia (M.A., '59) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (Ph.D., '63).  From 1985 to 1994, he held the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professorship in the Rutgers-New Brunswick history department, and from 1994-2003 was King University Professor.  He has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Howard University, University of California -San Diego; and Harvard.

Mr. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (twice), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a five-year John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.  He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.  He is a former trustee of  the National Humanities Center, a former commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, a former senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and served as president of the Society of American Historians, 2002-03.

Mr. Lewis has authored seven books: King: A Biography (1970); Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1974); District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History (1976); When Harlem Was in Vogue (1980); The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (1988);  W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993); W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (2000).  He has compiled two editions: The Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994) and W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (1995).  A Small Nation of People: W.E. B. Du Bois & African American Portraits of Progress (2003), co-authored with Deborah Willis, was a commission from the Library of Congress.  Mr. Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994 and again in 2001 for his two-volume life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois, also awarded the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in 1994. He is writing a short monograph about  Islam in Europe during the eighth century, under contract to Henry Holt and Company.

Mr. Lewis resides in Manhattan with his wife, Ruth Ann Stewart, professor in the Wagner School of Public Service, NYU.