David Christian is a professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He has written on the social and material history of the nineteenth-century Russian peasantry, in particular, on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. He has also written a textbook history of modern Russia and a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia (Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia). In 1989 he began teaching courses on Big History, surveying the past on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy, and, in 2004, he published the first text on Big History.
