Daniel Jütte is a historian of early modern and modern Europe. He is a Professor of History in the Department of History at New York University. His research interests lie in cultural history, urban history and material culture, history of knowledge and science, and Jewish history.

At NYU, Jütte has been involved in launching the Urban Humanities Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Before joining NYU, he taught history at Harvard University as well as at the University of Heidelberg.

Jütte is the author of three monographs. His most recent book, Transparency: The Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023),explores the history of architectural glass and how it has shaped the ways we see and interpret the world in which we live, spanning from antiquity to the 21^st century.

His second book, The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (Yale University Press, 2015), takes the history of doors, gates, and related technologies, such as the key, as a starting point to explore notions of security, privacy, and shelter.

Jütte’s award-winning first book, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (Yale University Press, 2015; first German ed. 2011), offers a general history of secrecy in the early modern period, with particular attention to the role of secrecy and secret sciences in Jewish-Christian relations.

Jütte is passionate about using inconspicuous or little-studied cultural practices and material objects as lenses for understanding the past. In his most recent book, Transparency, he focuses on one particular feature of our built environment that is usually meant to be unnoticed: transparent glass. By exploring two millennia of its history, Jütte is able to show that architectural glass is a cultural convention that developed in a long, often meandering historical process. His book also raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency: not only its costs in terms of visual privacy, but also its ecological price tag in an age of rapidly accelerating climate change.

Jütte is generally interested  in long processes – how ideas historically develop over the course of centuries and how these ideas relate to changing material realities.

Jütte earned his PhD from the University of Heidelberg. Following the completion of his graduate studies, he was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.