David Hopkin (historian)

David Hopkin (born 1966) is a British istorian, who specialises in European social history and folklore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Hopkin studied history at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, from 1985 to 1988.

From 1994 to 1997 he undertook a PhD, supervised by Peter Burke and Robert W. Scribner, before a spell as a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College.

From 1999 to 2005 Hopkin was based at the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, as first a lecturer then senior lecturer.

Hopkins's first monograph, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture was praised as the “product of meticulous research and high intelligence, expressed in superb prose” and was jointly awarded the Gladstone Book Prize in 2002.

Hopkin has called for historians to engage more with the subjects of folklore, writing in 2004 that historian should pay “…due attention not just to folklore collections, but to folklorists’ ideas and methods”.

He is currently Professor of Social History at the University of Oxford.

Hopkin joined Hertford College, University of Oxford, as Fellow and Tutor in History in 2005.

His second monograph, Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France, was awarded the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Prize in 2012.

In 2016, Hopkin was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for the project ‘Lacemakers – Poverty, Religion and Gender in a Transnational Work Culture’, which sought to "provide the first full length study of the shared work culture of lacemakers across nineteenth-century Europe; a history of women's experience of poverty constructed from folk songs and stories".

In 2023, Hopkin was elected President of the Folklore Society.

Hopkin is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

He was made Professor of European Social History in 2017.

Hopkin has authored and edited five books and numerous research articles.

He has been a key collaborator in a number of large-scale historical research projects, including the BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology.