Dr David Cox

David's teaching focuses on the United States in the long nineteenth century, from the early republic to WWI.

His third-year special subject, 'Racism in the United States,' investigates racial thought in America from Thomas Jefferson to the Harlem Renaissance. In the course of the module, which focuses on anti-black racism, in particular, students deal with topics including abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, the views of enslaved people, antebellum minstrelsy, advocates of polygenesis, and the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout, students engage with the thought of African American and white writers from across the century.

David's second year module, 'Ragtime: The Making of Modern America,' is a survey of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive-era. The module covers a wide range of topics from the Lost Cause to the Great Strike, including Jim Crow, the Ghost Dance, the Woman Suffrage Movement, Robber Barons, and early cinema. Throughout, the students consider the ways in which Americans contested the shape of American politics, economy, and society.

David's first year course, 'Racism and Resistance: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter' is co-taught with Professor Christer Petley. The course takes a comparative approach to the history of the black diaspora in the Atlantic world, focusing, especially, on the British Caribbean and United States. Each week, students look at the life and work of figures including Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Ida B. Wells, Jamaica Kincaid, Angela Davis, and Andrea Levy.

David studied for his BA and MA at the University of Sheffield, where he first became interested in US history. Having written his undergraduate dissertation on the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., David became fascinated by the roots of black Christianity, and turned his attention to the history of enslaved people in America. As a result of this interest, he wrote his MA dissertation on slave culture: specifically, the folktales told by enslaved people as a means of signifying on their experiences of oppression and resistance. David then went to the University of Cambridge for his PhD, where he moved from using folklore to engage in a social history of slavery to looking at the cultural politics involved in collecting and representing it in the decades after the Civil War. Having come to the end of this circuitous intellectual journey, David is now firmly rooted in the cultural history of postbellum America.