Professor Sir David Cannadine FBA FRSL FSA FRHistS, is an author and historian of modern British history.

He was born in Birmingham in September 1950 and attended King Edward VI Five Ways School. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in history, at St John's College, Oxford, where he completed his DPhil, and at Princeton University where he was Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow.  After completing his graduate work, he returned to Cambridge in 1977 to take up a position as a University lecturer in history and was elected a Fellow of Christ's College in the same year. He remained a Fellow at Christ’s until 1992 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College in 2005.

David was appointed to the professorial chair of history at Columbia University in 1988, returning to Britain ten years later as director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and, subsequently, as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History. In 2008 he joined the History Department of Princeton University and in 2014 he was appointed Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and also to a visiting professorship at the University of Oxford.

David has published extensively on many aspects of social, cultural, political and imperial history, with a particular focus on the British aristocracy; urban development and the structure of power in British towns; issues of class in Britain and the themes of cultural expression and ceremony both within Britain and its empire.

He is also widely known as a commentator on current events, in newspapers, on the radio and on television.

Cannadine holds honorary degrees from the University of the South Bank (2001), the University of East Anglia (2001), the University of Birmingham (2002), and the University of Worcester (2011). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research (2005), the Historical Association (2011), Christ's College, Cambridge (2005), and Clare College, Cambridge (2012), and an Honorary Churchill Fellow of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri (2012).

He was knighted for "services to scholarship" in 2009.

Publications include:

The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990);

G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992);

Class in Britain (1998);

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001);

Mellon: An American Life (2006);

The Thirty Year Rule (jointly, 2009);

The Right Kind of History (jointly, 2011);

The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond our Differences (2013).

George V: The Unexpected King (2014) 

Heroic Chancellor: Winston Churchill and the University of Bristol (2015).