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David Sim is a historian of the United States, with a particular focus on politics, foreign relations, imperialism and culture during the nineteenth century. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and joined the History Department at UCL in 2012. He teaches U.S. history from the Revolution to the present and is especially interested in international and transnational approaches to the past. His first book, published with Cornell University Press, investigated the intersection of the Irish nationalism, U.S. foreign policy and Anglo-American relations in the mid-nineteenth-century. He is currently conducting research for two new projects: the first uses a material history of the family of William Seward, a prominent antislavery politician, to investigate abolition and empire in the nineteenth-century United States; the second is a volume entitled To See A World: Microhistories of the Global United States, co-edited with Dr. Nora Lessersohn, which is under contract with Cornell University Press.
PhD supervision
David is interested in hearing from prospective students with interests relating to c.19th US history, focusing especially transnational, imperial, political, and cultural approaches.
Major publications
- ‘Domestic Politics in an Age of Integration: the United States, 1865-1895’ in the Cambridge History of America in the World, vol. 2, edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
- ‘Following the Money: Junk bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth Century United States’, Past and Present (May 2020).
- A Union Forever: The Irish Question and US Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age (Cornell UP, 2013)
For a full list of publications, see David's Iris profile.
