David A. Williams

David has a master’s degree in Transnational History and Culture and in Museums Galleries and Contemporary Culture. He has worked on exhibitions for Middle Temple Library, Tate Exchange and has developed educational material for the National Maritime Museum. He has a personal interest in contemporary participation with museums and contemporary culture and its role in social belonging such as class, social place, community, as well as cultural identities.

David has spent most of his life by the ocean in California which has developed a keen interest in societies' relationships with the maritime space and its role in developing sense of belonging to social groups, and to national and regional identities.

PhD supervision

• Principal Supervisor: Professor Paul Readman (Head of Cultures, Faculty of Arts & Humanities)
• Secondary Supervisor: Dr Pablo de Orellana (Lecturer in International Relations)
• Secondary Supervisor: Professor Arthur Burns (Professor of Modern British history)
• PhD Title: Britons and the Sea: Englishness and the Maritime Cultural Landscape c.1830-1914

Research Interests

My interests are social and culturally based and span the fields of Maritime History, History of Nations, Nationalism and Identity, and Environmental History in the modern world. In particular, I am interested social and cultural interactions with the environment and national identity as well as our relationships with the maritime world. I am also interested in the role of museums and the development and interaction with national identity.

• National Identity: scapes and identity, identity-making, nationalism; rituals and identity-based practices.
• Visual Culture: representation and production of identity; art for analytical purposes.
• Museums and culture: identity-making in museums; interaction and display of identity; national and regional museums and identity making.
• Maritime History: social and cultural interface; identity.

Selected publications

'Williams, David A. "Victorian Identity and the Sea: Imagining the Nation in Banal Maritime Art" in Roberts, Emma (ed). Art and the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 2022).

Exhibition: The Early Modern Inns of Court and the Circulation of Text( Middle Temple, May 2019). Digital Exhibition: Isolate Curate (Tate Exchange, May-June 2020).

Thesis

My thesis examines the representational role and imagery of maritime art and Englishness c.1830-1914 and the physical representation of the space through tourism. My research seeks to question the role of the maritime space in English identity, what representation of identity did the maritime space house, and in what ways was it interacted with. I argue for the maritime space as its own imaginary.