David Christian

David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.  He 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 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 also Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history.  He retired at the end of 2020.  Since 1990, he has given over 300 seminars, lectures and talks outside Macquarie University.

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 (http://www.ibhanet.org/). He is a Visiting Professor at the University of NSW.

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' (https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive), which has built free on-line high-school courses in big history. 

David Christian's 2011 TED talk, "A History of the World in 18 minutes", which launched the Big History Project, has been seen by more than 8 million viewers (https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history). 

From 2013 to 2020, he was Director of Macquarie University's Big History Institute (https://www.mq.edu.au/bighistory), 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 2014, he was winner of the Macquarie University Excellence in Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences for “The Big History Project: Education for the Anthropocene”.  In May 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by North Carolina State University.

Postgraduate students and their projects

Dr David Baker, PhD: "Big History: The Role of Universal Darwinism, Collective Learning, & the Rise of Complexity", PhD dissertation completed 2014.  David got his BA and MA at the University of Calgary, Canada.  David has worked on the Macquarie University Big History MOOC, and contributed to the work of the Big History Institute and the design of Big History School.

Rich Blundell, PhD: "Waking Up in the Anthropocene: Big History and the Biosphere", dissertation submitted January 2016.  Rich has undergraduate degrees in the natural sciences 
(BSc. geology & biology) and a master¹s degree in education (EdM. Science & the Public).

Elise Bohan, PhD: wrote a doctoral dissertation currently entitled: "The History and Evolution of Transhumanist Thought and its Significance in the Twenty-first Century: A Big History Perspective".  Her BA from Macquarie was in English.

Maximilian Barnett: is in the first year of a PHD, working on cycles of rise and fall from a big history perspective.

Selected Publications

Publications include:

 @font-face {font-family:Batang; panose-1:2 3 6 0 0 1 1 1 1 1; mso-font-alt:바탕; mso-font-charset:129; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1342176593 1775729915 48 0 524447 0;}@font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:"\@Batang"; panose-1:2 3 6 0 0 1 1 1 1 1; mso-font-charset:129; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1342176593 1775729915 48 0 524447 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:Batang; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Batang;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}

1. “‘The keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge’: Big History, Cosmic Evolution, and New Research Agendas”, Journal of Big History, III(3), 2019; 3 – 18
2. “The Anthropocene Epoch,” Ch. 11 of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of the World, 2018
3. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, Little/Brown in the US, Penguin in the UK and Australia, and several non-English publishers, 2018 [a popular account of the big history story] May 2018
4. A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia: Vol. 2, Inner Eurasia from the Mongol Empire to Today, Blackwell History of the World, Wiley/Blackwell, Feb 2018
5. "What is Big History?” Journal of Big History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2017), 4-19, available at https://journalofbighistory.org/index.php/jbh
6. Cambridge World History, Vol. 1, ed. David Christian, Cambridge: CUP, 2015
7. David Christian, Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, 2013 [a university textbook on big history]
8. "The Return of Universal History", History and Theory, Theme Issue, 49 (December 2010)
9. This Fleeting World, Berkshire Publishing: Great Barrington, Mass.: 2007 [A history of humanity in under 100 pages]
10. Big History a set of 48 lectures for the Teaching Company's "Great Courses", 2008
11. 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]
12. 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]
13. 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]
14. Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation, OUP, 1990
15. With R.E.F. Smith, Bread & Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 [became a standard history of food and drink pre-modern Russia; my contribution was 3 out of 9 chapters]

Forthcoming Publications include:

1. Future Stories: The Hidden Face of Time, 2022
2. "The Pacific Region in Deep Time," Ch. 2, Vol. 1 of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Pacific, ed. Paul D'Arcy

Teaching

Main teaching areas:

• Russian and Soviet History (main teaching area until 1990s)
• Big History (taught from 1989 to the present)

Other teaching areas include:

• European History,
• US history,
• Russian History and Literature,
• World Environmental History,
• the History of Inner Eurasia,
• Historiography,
• in 2018 he returned to his first area of expertise, teaching a new course on Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history