Darrin M. McMahon is currently the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History at Dartmouth, where he previously held the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Chair.  He was the Ben Weider Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University from 2004–2014. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine; Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books, 2013); and, most recently, Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea (Basic Books, 2023).

McMahon is also the editor of History and Human Flourishing (Oxford University Press, 2022); with Ryan Hanley of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2009); with Samuel Moyn, of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014); and with Joyce Chaplin of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2016). 

McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the Ecole Normale Supérieur, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and the University of Potsdam.  His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Literary Review, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. A recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, McMahon served as co-editor at the journal Modern Intellectual History from 2018-2023 and also as Vice President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation from 2014-2022.  He is currently at work on a book about lighting and illumination in the Age of Enlightenment.