Dr David Doddington

BA (hons), MA, PhD, FHEA, FRHistS

Publication

• Date
• Type
• Promoted

Research

Current Projects

Oxford Handbook of the Histories of Age and Aging (edited with Tracey Loughran)

‘Age’ is a capacious category. All societies, in all times and places, have employed classifications based on age. At the same time, age has different resonances in different political, legal, social, religious, and cultural contexts. It is lived differently depending not only on time and place, but on the body that ages: how it is sexed, gendered, and raced, and what capacities it holds. Scholars across different disciplines make use of formal and informal concepts of age, and these practices have also infiltrated the inherently interdisciplinary approach of history.

We propose to negotiate the wide-ranging status of age through the structure of the handbook and specific principles guiding the selection of contributors and the approach of each chapter. The handbook will be divided into sections on ‘life stages’, ‘times and places’, ‘identity and intersectionality’, and ‘perspectives and methods’, each with a separate introduction that draws out specific themes. The first section establishes age as a relational category, the second demonstrates that it is context-specific, the third addresses how age intersects with, connects to, and sometimes supersedes alternative identities, and the fourth provides methodological overviews. Contributors will be specialists in different regions and time periods, ensuring that the book is global in scope. Chapters in each section can include substantive case studies from the contributors’ specialist areas but must make comparisons in global context to maintain awareness of the relational and context-specific status of age. All chapters must consider how ‘race’, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and relationships of power affect the representations and experiences of age under discussion. We will encourage authors to engage with a range of source materials including visual and material culture.

Age, Generations, and Power in the American South – (Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2024-25)

In this project I explore how generational relationships among Black southerners changed and developed in the aftermath of slavery in the US. I examine how those who were born in bondage interacted with – and understood their position alongside – those “growing up” in freedom, and how both groups saw the dynamics of emancipation through a temporal lens. Age served as a relation of power in shaping social and community life for Black southerners seeking to rise from the ashes of slavery, and generational conflict marked out experiences and fashioned novel identities during Reconstruction, “Redemption,” and in the “New South.”

Future Projects 

Mixed Martial Arts: Gender, Power, and American Identity

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is one of the most popular sports across the globe, but also one of the most controversial. Since its contested development as a sanctioned sport in the US during the 1990s, critics have excoriated both its violence – assumed and real – but also the relative frequency with which practitioners, promoters, and fans have supported extremist political viewpoints. These have frequently related to visions of manhood predicated on strength and dominance and been tied to political movements associated with “strongmen,” with exclusionary rhetoric and a focus on authority by force. The ever-growing popularity of MMA, alongside its controversial nature, provides an ideal focus for an interdisciplinary study that reveals insights into US and UK society. The project will explore the history of MMA and its connections to social and cultural tensions in the Atlantic world from 1970 to 2022, with focus on age, class, gender, and race.

Past Research projects

Old Age and American Slavery (New York; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. Slavery was a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination: both elements of this were affected by concerns with age. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process, and dealt with elders, I emphasize the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers and their propagandists, I reveal how representations of old age, and experiences of aging, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery. The book asks us to rethink long-standing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and it illuminates the violent and exploitative nature of American slavery.

Writing the History of Slavery (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

Exploring the major historiographical, theoretical, and methodological approaches that have shaped studies on slavery, this addition to the Writing History series highlights the varied ways that historians have approached the fluid and complex systems of human bondage, domination, and exploitation that have developed in societies across the world. The first part examines more recent attempts to place slavery in a global context, touching on contexts such as religion, empire, and capitalism.

In its second part, the book looks closely at the key themes and methods that emerge as historians reckon with the dynamics of historical slavery. These range from politics, economics and quantitative analyses, to race and gender, to pyschohistory, history from below, and many more. Throughout, examples of slavery and its impact are considered across time and place: in Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe, colonial Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and trades throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Also taken into account are thinkers from Antiquity to the 20th century and the impact their ideas have had on the subject and the debates that follow.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars at all levels who are interested in not only the history of slavery but in how that history has come to be written and how its debates have been framed across civilizations.

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (New York; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

This monograph demonstrates that masculine identity was a site of contest and comparison within slave communities of the antebellum South. In exploring how enslaved people negotiated identities in relation to one another, and not simply with white society in mind, I help to demonstrate the fluidity of gender as a social and cultural construct and the limitations to any monolithic model of black solidarity.

Teaching

My teaching at Cardiff includes:

• Year 1: Making of the Modern World.
• Year 1: History in Practice.
• Year 1: Global Histories.
• Year 1: Projecting the Past.
• Year 2: Reading History.
• Year 2: Making History.
• Year 2: Debating History.
• Year 2: America: From Revolution to Reconstruction
• Year 3: Dissertation.
• Year 3: Slavery and Enslaved Life in the United States, 1775-1865.
• PGT: Skills in Historical Research.
• PGT: Trends in Historical Research.
• PGT: Atlantic Worlds.
• PGT: Dissertation.

I am supervising PhD students on the following topics:

PhD, AHRC SWWDTP Scheme:

• Will Comben (co-supervised with Dr Shaun Wallace): ‘Enslaved Women’s Fugitivity in antebellum Louisiana’. In progress.
• Ella Taviner (co-supervised with Dr Shaun Wallace): Predatory Rhetoric Within the Language of Physiognomy: The Link Between Literary and Scientific Methods of Racial Othering in Antebellum America.

PhD, Marshall Scholarship:

• Myya Helm (co-supervised with Dr Stephanie Ward): ‘The Presence of a Black Past: Racial Identity, Racial Discrimination, and the Working-Class Exclusion of Black Coal Miners in Predominantly White Coal Mining Communities’. In progress.

Past students include:

PhD, AHRC SWWDTP Scheme:

·         Dr Elizabeth Maeve Barnes (co-supervised with Professor Emily West): ‘Rape, Power, and Race: Black Women’s Responses to Sexual Violence in the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction US South’. Awarded 2020.

·         Dr Erin Shearer (co-supervised with Professor Emily West): ‘Women of Violence: Challenging Perceptions of Enslaved Women’s Resistance in the United States, 1808-1861’. Awarded 2023.

PhD, Critical/Creative PhD in English Literature:

·         Dr Pamela Price (co-supervised with Dr Catherine Butler): ‘Slavery, Literacy, and Power, and When We Were Nobody’. Awarded 2022.

I welcome enquiries for supervision in topics relating to slavery, gender, and race in American history.

Biography

Career overview

2019- – Senior Lecturer in North American History, Cardiff University.

2014-2019 – Lecturer in North American History, Cardiff University.

2013-2014 – Lecturer in U.S. History (fixed term), the University of York.

2012-2013 – Lecturer in U.S. History (fixed term), the University of Leicester.

2012-2013 – Early Career Fellow, the Institute of Advanced Studies, the University of Warwick.

2009 – 2013 – Seminar Tutor, the University of Warwick.

Education and qualifications

2009-2013 – PhD in History, the University of Warwick.

2008-2009 – MA in the History of Race in the Americas, the University of Warwick.

2005-2008 – BA (Hons), First Class, History, the University of Warwick.

Honours and awards

• 2025 – Visting Researcher (Oct-Nov), Georgetown University.
• 2024-25 Old Age and American Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023 [UK] and 2024 [US]), 384 pp.
  
  • Winner: Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award, 2025, Southern Historical Association. Given in recognition of a distinguished book in Southern history.
  • Finalist: SlaveryArchive Book Prize, 2024, for an outstanding book on the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery exploring any dimension, period, and geographical area, published in any country in English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish.
  • Honourable mention: Best Book, 2024, British Association for American Studies.
  • Finalist, Paul E. Lovejoy Award, 2024, awarded by Journal of Global Slavery for excellence and originality in a major work on any theme related to global slavery.
• 2025 – Leverhulme Research Fellowship: Age, Generations, and Power in the American South.
• 2025 – Invitation to Editorial Board, Nuova Rivista Storica (New Historical Journal).
• 2025 – Nominated for: Most Outstanding Learning Experience (x2), Learning and Teaching Collaboration of the Year, Champion for Student Voice & Partnership. Cardiff University, Enriching Student Life Awards
• 2024 – Nominated for: Excellence in Leadership, Cardiff University, Celebrating Excellence Awards.
• 2023 – Elected Editor (UK) of American Nineteenth Century History.
• 2023 – Welsh Crucible Funding Award: Screening Dementia: Framing Realities, Fostering Understanding (Co-I).
• 2023 – Nominated for: Excellence in Leadership, Cardiff University, Celebrating Excellence Awards.
• 2023 – Nominated for: Personal tutor of the year, Cardiff University, Enriching Student Life Awards.
• 2021 and 2022 – Nominated for: Most Uplifting Staff Member, Cardiff University, Enriching Student Life Awards.
• 2020 – Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• 2019 – Research Fellowship, Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Middelburg University, NL.
• 2018 – Leverhulme Research Fellowship: Old Age and American Slavery.
• 2018 – British Association for American Studies/Eccles Centre at the British Library, Founders’ Award: ‘The Inexorable Hand of Time’: Age and Power in American Slavery.
• 2018/19 – AHRC/BBC 3 New Generation Thinkers Finalist/Workshop Stage.
• 2017 – Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.
• 2013 – Humanities Research Centre Conference Award, Representing and Remembering Slavery in the Americas, University of York.
• 2013 – Warwick Transatlantic Fellowship, Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick
• 2012 – Early Career Fellowship, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick.
• 2011 – The Eccles Centre Postgraduate Award in North American Studies at the British Library.
• 2010 – Peter J. Parish Memorial Award – British American Nineteenth Century Historians.
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Professional memberships

• British Association for American Studies (BAAS).
• The Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH).
• The Southern Historical Association (SHA).
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Speaking engagements

Invited Lectures (select)

·       14/11/2025 – ‘The article publication process’. Invited speaker, ECR Workshop, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

·       30/10/2025 – ‘Age, Gender, and American Slavery: A Conversation with Dr. David Doddington’. Georgetown University.

·       02/2025 – ‘Age, Generations, and Power in the American South’. North American Seminar Series, Institute of Historical Research

·       04/2024 – ‘Publishing in American Studies’. Invited to lead workshop session for British Association for American Studies’ annual conference, co-hosted with editor of Journal of American Studies.

·       11/2023 – ‘Old age, power, and identity’. Invited keynote to introduce the new interdisciplinary MA, History, Power, and Identity, Essex University.

·       10/2023 – ‘Teaching histories of slavery and gender in UK Universities: Roundtable discussion’, British American Nineteenth Century Historians’ annual conference, Queen’s College, Oxford.

·       10/2023 – ‘Age, gender, and power in American Slavery’. Invited speaker at Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars at Bloomington University, Indiana, Global Slaveries: Fugitivity and the Afterlives of Freedom.

·       07/2019 – ‘“The summer of my life was passing away”: Age, Masculinity, and Resistance in the US Slave South’. Invited speaker, Historicising Masculinities Conference, Newcastle University.

·       04/2019 – ‘Violence and Honour in Slave Communities of the US South’. Invited speaker, Slavery and Honour in the Ancient Greek World, University of Edinburgh.

·       11/2018 – ‘Age, Identity, Selfhood and Slavery’. Invited speaker, Gender, Body, & Selfhood, Essex University.

·       03/2017 – ‘Age, Identity, and Solidarity in American Slave Communities’. Invited speaker, Beyond the Slave Community and Resistance Paradigms: Alternative Approaches to the Social Lives of Bondpeople in the Atlantic World, Leiden University, NL.

·       02/2016 – ‘“Old Fellows”: Age and Manhood among Slaves in the Antebellum South’. Invited speaker, American Studies Seminar Series, Canterbury Christ Church University.

·       02/2015 – ‘Contesting Manhood in Slave Communities of the Antebellum South’. Invited speaker, Modern History Seminar Series, University of York.

Committees and reviewing

• Member of Senate, Cardiff University (2023-2025)
• Athena Swan Committee (2022-23), SHARE, Cardiff University.
• Editor (UK) for American Nineteenth Century History.
• Steering Committee, British American Nineteenth Century History.
• Awards committee for Peter Parish Dissertation Prize, British American Nineteenth Century History.
• Editor for the Slavery section of The Routledge Online Encyclopaedia of Race and Racism.
• External assessor for ECR fellowship Applications to Cambridge University Colleges: Churchill, Fitzwilliam, Murray Edwards, Robinson, Trinity Hall.
• Assessor and moderator for AHRC DTP Scheme.
• Awards committee for BAAS student prize.
• Solicited book reviews, peer reviews, and endorsements of book and article manuscripts, including (but not limited to): American Historical Review, Family History, Journal of the Civil War Era, Black Perspectives, Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Southern History, William & Mary Quarterly, Nineteenth Century American History, Gender & History, Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of the Early Republic, Reviews in History, Journal of Social History, Social Sciences, Oxford University Press, Louisiana State University Press, University of North Carolina Press, De Gruyter.

Supervisions

I welcome enquiries over teaching and supervision on slavery, gender, age, and race in American history.

Current supervision

Myya Helm

Past projects

Erin Shearer (PhD): Women of Violence: Challenging Perceptions of Enslaved Women's Resistance in the United States, 1808-1861. Awarded 2023.

Pamela Price (PhD): Slavery, Literacy, and Power, and When We Were Nobody. Awarded 2022.

Elizabeth Maeve Barnes (PhD): 'Rape, Power, and Race: Black Women’s Responses to Sexual Violence in the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction US South.’ Awarded 2020.