Education
BA (Windsor)
MA (Windsor)
MPhil (Oxford)
DPhil (Oxford)

David is a Professor (2018) in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures. His original expertise was in late medieval literature, particularly Arthurian romance. His focus has shifted towards fantasy literature through its medieval roots. He developed Mount Royal's first fantasy course, and developed and taught three iterations of a fourth-year course in fantasy world-building. This brought together overlapping experiences of reading, gaming, cosplaying, creating and writing as students built and shared their own worlds. He has given a number of guest lectures on J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George R.R. Martin. He has published and presented on J.R.R. Tolkien's work and served as dramaturge on two professional theatre productions of The Hobbit, in Banff and Calgary.  More recently, he shared his expertise on goblins with the creative team from Spontaneous Theatre who created Goblin Macbeth, first performed at Calgary's The Shakespeare Company in 2022 and then the Stratford Festival in 2023.  He has also enjoyed teaching composition and a broad range of dramatic literature courses.

Dedicated to service leadership, he was chair of Mount Royal's Academic Council from 2002–2005, President of the Mount Royal Faculty Association from 2005-2010, and President of the Alberta Colleges and Institutes Faculties Association from 2010–2012. He served as Chair of English, Languages, and Cultures from 2012 to 2020, including the merger of the former departments of English and Languages and Cultures, in 2015.  He was Chair of Interior Design from 2020-2022, before joining the Faculty of Arts office as Acting Associate Dean and then Vice-Dean Curriculum, Policy, and Planning from 2023-2025.

His current work includes "Return of the (Burger) King", a memoir published in Freefall Magazine's Spring 2025 issue; a first fantasy novel; and further course development in medieval and fantasy literatures, and in applications of collaborative story-telling.