Professor David Maxwell

David is a Professorial Fellow at Emmanuel, and one of our Directors of Studies in History. At the University's Faculty of History, he is the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History.

Biography

David studied for his BA in History at Manchester University, followed by three years teaching in a rural secondary school in Manicaland, Zimbabwe. He then returned to England to take a DPhil in African History at St Antony’s College, Oxford. After a Fellowship in the Social Anthropology Department at Manchester University, he was appointed Lecturer in International History at Keele University in 1994. He was made Professor of African History at Keele in 2007 before joining the History Faculty in Cambridge in 2011, when he became a Fellow of Emmanuel. During his academic career he has held visiting fellowships and residencies in Australia, Switzerland and Italy, and has been awarded two major research grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, and from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust (Research Fellowship, 2016-18). David has also been elected an Honorary Fellow at the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Witwatersrand, SA, and the University of Lubumbashi, DRC.   He served as President of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (2014-16) and was longtime editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa.

Teaching

Although based in the History Faculty David also teaches on Divinity and African Studies courses. Undergraduate papers he has taught include ‘The Global South from 1750 to the Present Day’; ‘Religion and Nationalism in the Making of Zimbabwe, 1948 to the Present Day’; and 'Themes in World Christianity'. In addition, he teaches MPhil papers such as ‘Christianity, Identity and Social Change in Africa’.

Research

As a historian of African Christianity, David has written on mission history in colonial and post-colonial settings; the religious encounter of Christianity with African traditional religion; indigenous African Christian movements; Pentecostalism, transnationalism and religious globalisation. He also has an interest in religion and the media, particularly religious print and photography. His first monograph considered the religious encounter in Zimbabwe, and his second book was the history of a Southern African transnational Pentecostal movement. The third book, Religious Entanglements, examined missionary and African contributions to the creation of so-called ‘colonial knowledge’ in Belgian Congo/DRC. He is currently working on a broad-based study of Church, State and Society in post-colonial Zimbabwe and has recently collaborated with colleagues from the University of Zimbabwe and with Zimbabwean church leaders on a project on Ecumenical Politics and Political Transition since Independence.