Dmitri Levitin is a historian of pre-modern knowledge. His work seeks to reconstruct systems of knowledge in their totality – he has written about both the history of science (mathematics, medicine, natural philosophy) and the history of the humanities (classical reception, Biblical criticism, orientalism). 

A critic of intellectual histories that quest for genealogies of modernity, Levitin has instead prioritized the integration of the history of intellectual change and the history of education. His books include Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, The Kingdom of Darkness, and Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe. 

Levitin is also passionate about archival work and new discoveries. His own discoveries include a previously unknown “Rule of Philosophising” by Isaac Newton; he is currently co-editing the notebook of Newton’s university roommate and the only known verbatim transcript of an early modern university disputation. 

He recently completed a trade book, to be published by Penguin Books, on the history of the sciences and humanities from ancient Mesopotamia to 1700, foregrounding educational institutions. 

Levitin’s most recent work has shifted to the 18th century, exploring how philological scholarship and theology informed early ideas about Western exceptionalism and laid the groundwork for early racism. 

Levitin has covered a diverse range of topics: he has shown how historical assumptions are more important in the shaping of modern scientific mentalities than overt methodology; he has argued that the work of even the most eminent scientists and scholars was the product of the educational framework from which they emerged; he has attempted a full integration of theology into the history of early modern intellectual life; and he has sought to recover a European mental universe that existed before the rise of Philhellenism, when every learned man or woman was, by default, a ‘global’ thinker.    

Levitin was educated at Cambridge, and he has held positions at Trinity College, Cambridge; All Souls College, Oxford; California Institute of Technology (Caltech); and Utrecht University.