Devin J. Vartija is assistant professor of history at Utrecht University and a former post-doctoral fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is an intellectual historian whose main body of work focuses on the complex interplay between race and equality in Enlightenment England, France, and Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. (with distinction) in 2018 at Utrecht University. His first book, The Colour of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought, systematically interrogates the strands of equality and inequality, common humanity and racial classification that run through the Enlightenment and has recently been published (August 2021) by the University of Pennsylvania Press (more info here).
By carefully reconstructing the intellectual world in which the modern concepts of race and equality were forged, he demonstrates that the all-too-common dichotomous view of the Enlightenment as either an emancipatory or a pernicious movement of modernity variously advanced by the left and right falls short of where the Enlightenment’s real significance lies: its self-reflexivity. It is a rigorous intellectual history that demonstrates the value of studying the history of political ideas: to appreciate that our concepts, both descriptive and normative, are not the concepts for understanding the world and looking at the past opens up new ways of seeing.
He completed a research master’s (cum laude) in history at Utrecht University in 2012 and obtained his bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) from the interdisciplinary Arts and Science program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
He is currently working on two projects. One is a book-length examination of how debates concerning inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality became central to Enlightenment historiography over the past fifty years. He is also researching how the new variety of commercial venues in eighteenth-century urban centres of France and England formed sociable spaces in which rank was temporarily suspended, thus leading to new ways of experiencing and reflecting on in/equality.
He is the former managing editor of the International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, published by Brill and a board member of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His research has been featured in the NRC Handelsblad and he has been interviewed by De Volkskrant and NPO Radio 1.