Denis Crispin Twitchett (23 September 1925 – 24 February 2006) was a British Sinologist and scholar who specialized in Chinese history, and is well known as one of the co-editors of The Cambridge History of China.

Denis Twitchett was born on 23 September 1925 in London, England. He read Modern Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1946-47 before moving on to read the Oriental Studies at Cambridge from 1947-50. He was a lecturer at the University of London (1954–56) and Cambridge (1956–60), the Chair of Chinese at the universities of London (1960–68) and Cambridge (1968–80), and the Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University (1980–94). He was a fellow of the British Academy from 1967. He greatly expanded the role of Chinese studies in Western intellectual circles.

During World War II, Twitchett took a crash course in Japanese and for the remainder of the war he was part of the Bletchley Park operations acting as a listener at one of the forward listening stations in Sri Lanka. After the war he gained a degree in geography at Cambridge. He also spent a great deal of time in Japan and was able to learn from the best Japanese historians of China (who tended to focus on Tang China, a period which became his field of expertise also). He married Umeko Ichikawa in 1956. Together they had two children.

Starting in 1966, Professor Twitchett and historian John K. Fairbank (who taught at Harvard) began plans for the first comprehensive history of China to be published in the English language. Originally expected to be a six volume set of books, the series expanded as time passed and eventually grew to the currently planned 15 volumes. While he was at Princeton, Twitchett worked closely with fellow Sinologist Frederick W. Mote (who had a related wartime experience).

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