Darrin M. McMahon is a historian and author, and the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor at Dartmouth College. Born in Carmel, California, and 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 Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (published in 2013 with Basic Books). His work on happiness 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. McMahon is also the editor, 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, 2015). McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, the École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Washington Post, The New Republic, L’Histoire, Live Happy, and the Literary Review. The recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon, Humboldt, and Guggenheim foundations, he is currently writing a study on the idea of equality in Western Culture, under contract with Basic Books, New York.