David Ballantyne

Biography

Biography

I am a senior lecturer in American History, and the Liberal Arts Programme Director at Keele. I received undergraduate, MPhil, and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Keele in 2016, I held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Leiden University.

I am currently a member of the Membership Committee for the Southern Historical Association, and the British Association for American Studies Executive Committee.  I have previously served as the Membership Secretary for the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS).  

I organised the February 2020 HOTCUS Winter Symposium on “Food, Health, and Welfare in U.S. History,” and was the lead organiser for the April 2023 British Association for American Studies Annual Conference.

Research and scholarship

Research and scholarship

I am primarily a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States, with specialisations in politics, race, inequality, and memory. 

My first book, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), probed South Carolina Democrat Ernest F. Hollings’s negotiation of southern politics during a period of social, political, and economic transformation.  My second book, Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana, focussed on the region during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and afterwards.  It was published in 2025 with Louisiana State University Press in the “Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War” book series. 

My research has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, The Sixties, and the Journal of American Studies.  I also edited a Journal of American Studies special issue on "Food, Health and Welfare in the Long Twentieth Century," published in 2023.

Publications

Publications