America250: Worlds of Revolution – Prof. David Bell (April 15, 2026)

“Revolutionary Authoritarianism”

A lecture by Professor David Bell (Princeton University)

This event will occur on April 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM in the Mortara Center for International Studies, 3600 N St NW, DC 20057. Attendance is free but registration is required.

“America250: Worlds of Revolution” is a part of the Georgetown University Global Humanities Faculty Seminar Series, co-sponsored by the Global Irish Studies Initiative, the Office of the Vice President for Global Engagement, the Department of History, the Walsh School of Foreign Service, and the Mortara Center for International Studies.

In all the major Western revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a military leader emerged as both the movement’s leader and symbol: George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture, Simon Bolivar. The talk will explain why this was the case, and why the Age of Revolution was also, in most cases, an age of revolutionary authoritarianism.

About the speaker

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton where he recently served as director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Born in New York in 1961, he was educated at Harvard and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1991. Before returning to Princeton in 2010 he taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty. A specialist in the history of France, he is the author of seven books, including The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2001), The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and most recently Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wilson Center, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science, and, as a Corresponding Fellow, to the British Academy. A former Contributing Editor of The New Republic, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Nation.

Worlds of Revolution: America 250 as a Global Historical Event

Supported by the Georgetown University Office of the Vice President for Global Engagement, and coordinated between the GU Global Irish Studies Initiative and the GU Institute for Global History, “Worlds of Revolution” is one of Georgetown University’s signature contributions to the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution.

Reflecting on the American Revolution and its international legacies, the series will invite audiences to consider the concept of an “age of revolutions”, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. In this long era of revolts against monarchies and empires, rebellions against rulers and dynasties, rejections of longstanding ideas, and competing attempts to build new orders on the site of the old, some revolutions achieved their stated aims. Others did not. Yet all produced a much different world, one that “Worlds of Revolution” will seek to better understand with close looks at commonalities, differences, and connections between revolutionary experiences across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in addition to North America.