David Levering Lewis joined the NYU faculty as a professor of history on September 1, 2003.  His field is comparative history with a special focus on 20^th-century US social history and strong interests in 19th-century Africa, 20^th-century France, and Muslim Iberia. In October 2003, Mr. Lewis was named Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History at NYU. On September 19, 2010, Dr Lewis had the singular honor to deliver the address on the occasion of the first NYU-Abu Dhabi convocation: “From Athens to Abu Dhabi: Arrival of the Global University.”

A 1956 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk University, a 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. He retired from NYU in 2013 as a University Professor, Emeritus.

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 Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. 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 On February 25, 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at the White House. On May 25, 2023, his birthday, Mr. Lewis received a Doctor of Law, Honoris Cause, from Harvard University, his eleventh honorary degree.

Mr. Lewis has authored ten books: King: A Biography (1970, 1978, 2013); 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). W.E.B. Du Bois: The Biography (2009).  Each Du Bois volume received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1994 and 2001) and the first Du Bois volume was also awarded the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize. Henry Holt and Company published W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, a single-volume version of the two-volume life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois in July 2009. Lewis’s recent book, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 was published by Norton (2008). That book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Croatian, Korean, and Indonesian. His recent life and times of Wendell Willkie was published by Liveright/Norton in 2018: The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order. His current monograph under contract with Penguin Randomhouse bears the provisional title: The Woman in the Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1795-1960.

Mr. Lewis 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. He has reviewed for the New York Times Sunday Book Review; New Yorker; Washington Post Book World; New York Review of Books; Nation; The American Scholar.

Dr. Lewis resides in Manhattan and Shellburne Falls, Massachusetts, with Dolores Root. Allison Lillian Lewis and Michael Wilson and granddaughters, Marissa and Natalie, live in Washington, DC.  Autistic son, Eric Levering, lives in a group home in Canton, Massachusetts.