David Marshall is Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on eighteenth-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy. He is the author of numerous essays (on such authors as Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Lennox, Mackenzie, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Hume, and Rilke, among others) and four books: The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (1986); The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (1988); The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815 (2005), which was awarded the 2005-2006 Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; and Forgetting Fathers: Untold Stories from an Orphaned Past. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he also has lectured widely and published on issues in higher education and public education.

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.

From 2003 to 2014, David Marshall was Chair of the University of California President’s Advisory Committee on Research in the Humanities, which oversees the UC Humanities Network. He was the Principal Investigator for the $12,775,000 University of California Multi-Campus Research Program and Initiative Award for the UC Humanities Network. He is a member of the Board of Directors (and Immediate Past President) of the National Humanities Alliance, which advances national humanities policy in the areas of research, education, preservation, and public programs.