DAVID CHRISTIAN is director of the Big History Institute and distinguished professor in history at Macquarie University in Sydney.
By training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union who received his Ph.D from Oxford University in 1974, he became interested in 1980s in world history on very large scales...or big history.
He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000 before taking a position at San Diego State University in 2001. In January 2009 he returned to take up a position at Macquarie University. From 2009 to 2013 he has held a position as a World Class Universities Distinguished Professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul; and over the same period, he has also held a position as a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont.
He was founding president of the International Big History Association, and is co-founder (with Bill Gates), of the Big History Project, which has built a free online high school syllabus in big history.
Christian 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 textbook history of modern Russia, and a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia (Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia) up to the time of the Mongol Empire.
At San Diego State University, he taught courses on 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], and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Global History and the Cambridge History of the World.
Among his numerous books and publications he is co-author of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (with Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin); and author of This Fleeting World, Maps of Time, and Origin Story.
