David Brion Davis




David Brion Davis is one of the leading historians of our time. He is widely considered the world’s most pre-eminent scholar of slavery. He is the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which he founded in 1998 and directed until 2004. He received a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1956. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 1969, he taught at Cornell University for 14 years. He was also a Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University and the holder of the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Davis was president of the Organization of American Historians in 1988-1989. He has written or edited eighteen books, including The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1975), winner of the National Book Award for History and Biography, the Albert Beveridge Award, and the Bancroft Prize; Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford University Press, 1984); Revolutions: American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Harvard University Press, 1990); In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2001), Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2003); and the magisterial In Human Bondage: Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006). Davis received the Society of American Historians’  Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction (2007).




For more information, contact: Donald Yerxa, yerxad@bu.edu






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