David is a final-year student working on British and American participation at World's Fairs in the late nineteenth century. More expansively his project examines cultural and commercial interactions between Britons and Americans, and changes in how US citizens and British subjects imagined each other between 1851 and 1893. Before embarking on this project, much of David's work at masters and undergraduate level centered on British ideas about American democracy, and racial kinship with the United States in the period before the First World War. He has also taught writing, and nineteenth-century American history, at UCL and Queen Mary University of London, and as of September 2017 will be teaching twentieth-century US History at the UCL Institute of the Americas.
PhD
Supervisors: Adam Smith and David Sim
Working title: 'Britain and the United States at the World's Fairs, 1851-1893'
Expected completion date: 2018
Conference papers and presentations
- 'The Anglo-American Past at the Philadelphia Centennial', IAAS BAAS Joint Conference, Queen's University Belfast, April 2016.
- 'The United(?) States at the 1862 Exhibition', BrANCH Conference, Cambridge, October 2016.
- '"Buffaloes are not, as a rule, hunted in New York City": Buffalo Bill and the 1887 American Exhibition in London', American Studies workshop, University of Portsmouth, January 2017; and QMUL American Symposium, June 2017.
- 'The United States and the search for international legitimacy at the 1876 Centennial', IHR North American History Seminar, London, June 2017.
Media appearances/outreach work
David blogs alongside a group of other UCL American History PhD students at the Young Americanists.
Teaching 2018-19 (postgraduate teaching assistant)
- Writing History
- Building the American Nation