Education: 

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014

MPhil, University of Cambridge, 2007

BA, Columbia University, 2006

Field and Specialties: 

History of science, technology, and medicine / history of capitalism

David Singerman is a historian of science, technology, the environment, and American capitalism. He received his PhD in 2014 from MIT's program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, where his research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. David's dissertation, "Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930," was awarded prizes in 2015 for the best dissertation in business history in both the U.S. and Britain, and his work has been published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of British Studies, and Enterprise & Society, while another article is forthcoming in Radical History Review.

At UVA, he is working on his first book, entitled Purity and Power in the American Sugar Empire, 1860-1940, which narrates a new history of U.S. imperialism by tracing material struggles over knowledge about sugar’s substance and value. Drawing on research in U.S., Cuban, and Hawaiian archives, Purity and Power shows how the U.S’s attempts to govern nature and human labor in its Pacific and Caribbean colonies were inseparable from contests over corruption, free trade, and corporate power at home. He is also preparing an article about food, labor, and scientific knowledge in the 1880s and 1890s, examining scandals over the smuggling of frozen Canadian herring into Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Before coming to Virginia, David was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and a research associate at Harvard Business School.

Publications

Journal articles and book chapters

• “Who’s Afraid of the Dark Sugar?,” in Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Food, ed. Benjamin Cohen, Anna Zeide, and Michael Kideckel (MIT Press, 2021), https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542913/acquired-tastes/

• (with Aaron Stupple and Leo Anthony Celi), "The Reproducibility Crisis in the Age of Digital Medicine," npj Digital Medicine 2, no. 1 (January 29, 2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-019-0079-z
• "Sugar Machines and the Fragile Infrastructure of Commodities in the Nineteenth Century," Osiris vol. 33 (2018), special issue on "Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories," https://doi.org/10.1086/699234
• “The Limits of Chemical Control in the Caribbean Sugar Factory,” Radical History Review 127 (January 2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01636545-3690858
• “Science, Commodities, and Corruption in the Gilded Age”, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537781416000128
• “Keynesian Eugenics and the Goodness of the World”, Journal of British Studies (July 2016), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/abs/keynesian-eugenics-and-the-goodness-of-the-world/1D1FE14255DA18E1DA28ED94E9680198
• “Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930”, Enterprise and Society (December 2015), hhttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/abs/inventing-purity-in-the-atlantic-sugar-world-18601930/183DF15D0982BAD7047DBFAF163BF1D2
• “‘A Doubt is At Best an Unsafe Standard’: Measuring Sugar in the Early Bureau of Standards,” NIST Journal of Research 112, no. 1 (January 2007), http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/jres.112.004

Newspapers

• “The Shady History of Big Sugar,” op-ed in The New York Times, 17 September 2016.

Interviews

• “Public Thinker: Lara Putnam Wants You to Knock on Your Neighbor’s Door,” Public Books, July 2022.

Online essays

• "There’s Something Fishy About U.S.-Canada Trade Wars," The Atlantic online, 14 June 2018.

Pieces for Bunkhistory.org

• The Sugar Tramp, 10 January 2018.
• The Other End of the Telescope, 24 November 2017.
• When Science was Big, 19 October 2017.
• Full list here

Courses Taught: 

From fall 2024 through spring 2026, Prof. Singerman will be teaching Engagements courses in the College Fellows program.

Current courses

• HIST 3501 Workshop: Sugar and Global History
• AMST 3001 Theories and Methods of American Studies
• HIUS 2101 Technologies of American Life

Previous courses

• HIST 1501 The Global Financial Crisis of 2008
• HIST 1501 Corruption and Fraud
• AMST 3559 Science and Democracy in America

Website:

http://history.virginia.edu/people/profile/ds2ax