David Marshall is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on eighteenth-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy, the role of autobiography in the history of the novel, and the history of public education and liberal education in the United States. His articles and essays, ranging from Homer and Shakespeare to Rilke and Coetzee, have appeared in numerous journals and collections. He is the author of four books: The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot; The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley; The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815, which was awarded the Louis Gottschalk Prize for the Outstanding Book in Eighteenth-Century Studies; and Forgetting Fathers: Untold Stories from an Orphaned Past. Marshall was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Yale University Morse Fellowship.

Marshall is Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He served for sixteen years as Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and was the first Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts. From 2005 to 2012, he also was Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Before joining UC Santa Barbara, Marshall was a professor at Yale University, where he taught from 1979 to 1997. At Yale he served as Chair of the English Department, Director of the Literature Major, Acting Chair of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, among other appointments. He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.

Marshall has lectured widely on issues in higher education and public education, speaking at such venues as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, the National Humanities Conference, and the Center for Research Libraries Global Collections Forum. From 2008 to 2022, David Marshall was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance, which advances national humanities policy in the areas of research, education, preservation, and public programs. As President of the Board of Directors from 2014 to 2018, he helped devise successful strategies to protect and increase funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries.

Past professional service includes the Association of American Universities/American Council of Learned Societies Humanities Steering Committee, the PMLA Editorial Advisory Committee, the Eighteenth-Century Studies Editorial Board, the Modern Language Association Teagle Working Group on the Disciplines and Undergraduate Liberal Education, and the Board of Directors of the Telluride Association Summer Programs.

Research Areas

Enlightenment literature, aesthetics, and moral philosophy; novel and narrative theory; autobiography; theater and theatricality; higher education and public education.