Frontiers Forum > Speakers 2020 > David Christian | Macquarie University

David Christian | Macquarie University

David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in world history and in history at very large scales and across many disciplines. He began teaching Russian and European history at Australia’s Macquarie University in 1975; from 1989 he also began teaching courses in Big History. In 2001 he took up a position at San Diego State University, where he taught courses on World History, Big History, World Environmental History, Russian History, and the History of Inner Eurasia.  In January 2009 he returned to Macquarie University, where he has mainly taught Big History, but is now teaching Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history.

He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and the Royal Society of N.S.W.  He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Global History and the Cambridge World History. He has held temporary appointments at the University of Vermont and at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and was the founding President of the International Big History Association.

He has written on the social and material history of the 19th century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. He has also written a text book history of modern Russia, and the first volume of a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia (Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia). In 2004, he published the first monograph on 'Big History', Maps of Time. With Bill Gates, he is co-founder of the 'Big History Project', which has built free on-line high-school courses in big history.  Since 2013, he has been Director of Macquarie University's Big History Institute, and led the collaboration of twenty academics across all faculties to develop Macquarie University's MOOC on big history: "Big History: Connecting Knowledge", on the Coursera platform. He is co-creator of Macquarie University's Big History School, which provides K-12 online courses in Big History. In May 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by North Carolina State University.