Sir David Nicholas Cannadine (born 7 September 1950) is a British author and historian who specialises in modern history, Britain and the history of business and philanthropy. He is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a visiting professor of history at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has been the president of the British Academy since 2017, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also serves as the chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London and vice-chair of the editorial board of Past & Present. Education and early career David Nicholas Cannadine was born in Birmingham on 7 September 1950 and attended King Edward VI Five Ways School. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in history, at St John's College, Oxford, where he completed his DPhil, and at Princeton University where he was a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. After completing his graduate work, he returned to Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at St John's College, and was then elected a Fellow of Christ's College and appointed to a university lectureship in history. Subsequent career Cannadine was appointed to the professorial chair of history at Columbia University in 1988, returning to Britain ten years later as director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and, subsequently, as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History. In 2008 he joined the History Department of Princeton University from which he has announced his intention to retire at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year. In 2014 he was appointed Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and also to a visiting professorship at the University of Oxford. Cannadine has held many other visitorial appointments: at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (twice), at Birkbeck College, London, at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale, at ANU Canberra, at the NHC North Carolina, at the Huntington Library and at New York University Stern School of Business. He is the general editor of the Penguin History of Britain and the Penguin History of Europe. He is currently completing a volume on the history of the Ford Foundation. Works Cannadine's books include The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990); G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992); Class in Britain (1998);