DAVID CHRISTIAN (DPhil, Oxford University) is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. He has spent most of his career at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, apart from an eight-year period teaching at San Diego State University from 2001 to 2008. Christian has published histories of modern Russia and also a study of the role of the trade in vodka in nineteenth-century Russia. In 1998, he published A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, the first volume in the Blackwell History of the World Series. He began teaching courses on big history in 1989 at Macquarie University. He first used the phrase big history for such courses in an article published in the Journal of World History in 1991 titled The Case for Big History. In 2010, with Bill Gates, he founded the Big History Project, which is building a free online high school course in big history due for release in late 2013. Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He is the founding president of the International Big History Association.
