David Christian
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 on very large scales. He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000 before coming to San Diego State University in 2001. 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 a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia (Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia). In 1989, he began teaching courses on 'Big History', surveying the past on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy; and in 2004, he published the first text on ‘Big History’. At SDSU, he teaches World History, ‘Big History’, World Environmental History, Russian History, and the History of Inner Eurasia. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen [Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities], Affiliates Chair for the World History Association, and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Global History and the Cambridge History of the World. In 2008, he was appointed as a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont. Recent publications include: 1) This Fleeting World, Berkshire Publishing: Great Barrington, Mass.: 2007. (A history of humanity in under 100 pages). 2) Big History a set of 48 lectures for the Teaching Company, 2008. 3) Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Foreword by W.H. McNeill, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. (The first modern attempt by a historian to offer a coherent history of the entire past, beginning with the origins of the Universe; an attempt to explore how human history is embedded in the histories of the biosphere and the Universe; Maps of Time won the 2005 WHA History Prize for the best book in world history published in 2004); 4) A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia: Vol 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire, in The Blackwell History of the World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. (The first synoptic study of “Inner Eurasia” from prehistory up to the 13th century; the first of 2 volumes.); 5) Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1997. (A textbook survey of Russian and Soviet history.)