Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Political and Intellectual History at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the history of political thought from 1700 to the present and on the history of democracy.

De Dijn's first book, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Leveled Society, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008 (paperback edition October 2011). Her second monograph, Freedom: An Unruly History, was published in 2020 by Harvard University Press and explores the changing meaning of freedom from Herodotus to the present. The book won the 2021 PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers.

De Dijn is currently working on a new book on the history of democracy in Europe from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, tentatively titled Democracy: The History of an Improbable Idea.