David Christian

Biography

David Christian is a Professor Emeritus of Macquarie University in Sydney, after retiring at the end of 2020. He gained his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974.  He taught for many years in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University, and has also taught at San Diego State University, and Ewha University in Seoul. His early teaching and research was in Russian and Soviet history, and his textbook histories of modern Russia, Power and Privilege and Imperial and Soviet Russia have been widely used in schools and Universities. In 1990, he published Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation, a history of the vodka trade and the corruption associated with it in 19^th century Russia.  He has published a two-volume History of Inner Eurasia for the Blackwell History of the World (Vol. 1 1998, Vol. 2, 2018). Since the 1990s he has also taught world history and courses in big history, which cover the entire history of the Universe and cross many disciplines, from cosmology to biology and history. In 2004 he published Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. With the support of Bill Gates, he helped create a free online big history course for High School Students, called the “Big History Project”. His 2011 TED talk, “A History of the Universe in 18 minutes” has been viewed more than 13 million times. In 2013, with Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin, he published the first University text on big history, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. In 2018, he published Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, and in 2022 he published Future Stories: What’s Next? which is about the future, future thinking and the stories we tell ourselves about likely futures.   In 2011, David was elected the Founding President of the newly established International Big History Association.  He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen [Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities], and of the Royal Society of N.S.W. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from N.C. State University, and from 2021-2024, he was appointed as a Visiting Professorial Fellow in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is currently working on a series of short YouTube talks on Big History for Primary Schools and a book on the idea of “Core Stories” in human history.