Marc David has taught at the college since 2014.  He leads courses that explore social difference, public culture and everyday life, and the politics of cultural policy and expertise.

Marc received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and held a position at the University of Oklahoma before coming to St. Olaf. 

His research has focused on the intersection of public history and governmentality, everyday memory and ethics, and race.  In 2025, he published Remembering the Cajun Past: Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana with the University of Massachusetts Press.  The fruit of two decades of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the book illuminates how the citizen-making aims of one historic site’s many funders, sponsors, and designers merged with the personal projects and desires of many (though not all) of the region’s Cajun natives, which included remembering their distant, forgotten past. 

Marc lives in St. Paul with his wife Danyelle and their dog Belle.