About
David specialises in the cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth-century United States. In particular, he is interested in the racial politics of discourse on African American culture.
Having earned his BA and MA at the University of Sheffield, David moved to the University of Cambridge where he completed his PhD. Before joining the department, David lectured in American history at the University of Swansea and the University of Sheffield.
David is co-convenor of the North American History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Race
- Folklore
- Magic
- The Atlantic world
- Religion
Current research
David specialises in the racial politics of culture. Having published articles on Reconstruction-era discourse on superstition and late-nineteenth-century discussion of folklore, David is currently completing a monograph on the ways in which African American culture was represented between emancipation and the Great Migration. This project focuses especially on discussion of the spiritual beliefs of black southerners, moving from the missionary work of the 1860s and '70s, through the dialect literature of the 1880s, before finishing with sensationist, turn-of-the-century depictions of Vodou.
David is also working on another project, using discourse on race as a means of exploring the relationship between magic and modernity in the Atlantic world. The project uses several case studies in order to demonstrate that ideas of race were a form of superstition.
Research projects
Active projects
Publications
Teaching
David's teaching focuses on the United States in the long nineteenth century, from the early republic to WWI.
His third-year special subject, 'Racism in the United States,' investigates racial thought in America from Thomas Jefferson to the Harlem Renaissance. In the course of the module, which focuses on anti-black racism, in particular, students deal with topics including abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, the views of enslaved people, antebellum minstrelsy, advocates of polygenesis, and the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout, students engage with the thought of African American and white writers from across the century.
David's second year module, 'Ragtime: The Making of Modern America,' is a survey of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive-era. The module covers a wide range of topics from the Lost Cause to the Great Strike, including Jim Crow, the Ghost Dance, the Woman Suffrage Movement, Robber Barons, and early cinema. Throughout, the students consider the ways in which Americans contested the shape of American politics, economy, and society.
David's first year course, 'Racism and Resistance: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter' is co-taught with Professor Christer Petley. The course takes a comparative approach to the history of the black diaspora in the Atlantic world, focusing, especially, on the British Caribbean and United States. Each week, students look at the life and work of figures including Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Ida B. Wells, Jamaica Kincaid, Angela Davis, and Andrea Levy.
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
David studied for his BA and MA at the University of Sheffield, where he first became interested in US history. Having written his undergraduate dissertation on the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., David became fascinated by the roots of black Christianity, and turned his attention to the history of enslaved people in America. As a result of this interest, he wrote his MA dissertation on slave culture: specifically, the folktales told by enslaved people as a means of signifying on their experiences of oppression and resistance. David then went to the University of Cambridge for his PhD, where he moved from using folklore to engage in a social history of slavery to looking at the cultural politics involved in collecting and representing it in the decades after the Civil War. Having come to the end of this circuitous intellectual journey, David is now firmly rooted in the cultural history of postbellum America.