David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor at New York University. His field is comparative history, with a special focus on 20th-century U.S. social history, and strong interests in 19th-century Africa and 20th-century France. His work on W.E.B. DuBois has twice earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography– first in 1994, for W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, which also won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize; and again in 2001, for W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. He is the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for biography for back-to-back volumes.

A 1956 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk University, Lewis holds a master's degree in history from Columbia, and a doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 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 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, the John D. and Catherine 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 was president of the Society of American Historians, 2002-2003.

In addition to his two-volume work on W.E.B. DuBois, Lewis is the author of King: A Biography (1970), Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1974), District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History (1976), When Harlem Was in Vogue (1980), and The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (1988). He has compiled two anthologies: 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 commissioned by the Library of Congress. His most recent work is God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008).

Professor Lewis lives in Manhattan with his wife, Ruth Ann Stewart.

Bibliography:

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008)

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (2000)

W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993)

The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (1988)

When Harlem Was in Vogue (1980)

District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History (1976)

Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1974)

King: A Biography (1970)