Annelien de Dijn

Annelien de Dijn is a Professor of History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she teaches political and intellectual history. Her research focuses on the history of political thought in Europe and in the United States from 1700 to the present. She has a particular interest in the histories of key political concepts such as freedom, democracy and liberalism, as well as in Enlightenment political thought.

She is the author of Freedom: An Unruly History, an intellectual history of freedom from Herodotus to the present, which will appear with Harvard University Press in 2020, as well as of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008, paperback edition October 2011). Her articles and essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals, including Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, The Historical Journal, the Review of Politics and the History of Political Thought.

Before joining Utrecht University, De Dijn was a professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam. She has also held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Cambridge University, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California at Berkeley. She received her M.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the University of Leuven in Belgium.