– David P. Cline –
Historian specializing in 20th century U.S. social movements, oral history, and digital and public history
I am a Professor of History at San Diego State University and Director of the SDSU Center for Public and Oral History. I am also a Faculty Advisor to the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS) program and Affiliated Faculty in Digital Humanities as well as in LGBT Studies at SDSU. I teach classes in public history, digital history, digital humanities, the civil rights movement, history through biography, oral history, the 1960s, and sports history.
From 2011-2017, I was an Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech, where I co-directed the Graduate Certificate in Public History and served as core faculty with Virginia Tech’s Master’s Program in Material Culture and Public Humanities.
From 2008-2011, I was the Associate Director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dedicated to exploring the many potentials of the digital humanities, I worked on a number of interdisciplinary projects incorporating history and technology, especially the use of augmented and virtual reality in the teaching of public history.
Before turning to U.S. history full-time, I worked as a journalist, arts administrator, and publicist in Western Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia before returning home to California.
My public history projects have included serving as a Research Scholar and Lead Interviewer for the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African and American History and Culture, helping to develop an iPad application that uses augmented reality to teach historical methods and African American history to fifth graders, contributing to a virtual and augmented reality-enhanced history project on World War I, and co-founding the VT Stories university oral history project and a number of other major oral history research projects, including the VT LGBTQ Oral History Project. My other works include editorial projects for National Geographic, a National Public Radio documentary on the Korean War in 2002-2003 ,and a 2005 project to document the Cherokee Trail of Tears. I am also interested in African culture and history and has lived and worked several times in Kenya.
I hold a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.A. in U.S. History with a certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a BA in African Studies from Macalester College.