David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at the Queen's University of Belfast where he works on the history of geographical ideas and the historical geographies of science and religion. He is currently completing an intellectual history of climatic reductionism, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, under the title “The Empire of Climate”.

He was awarded the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1998, the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in 2008, and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 2011. He has been a Member of the Royal Irish Academy since 1998, and in 2002 was elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences and to the Academia Europaea. He has delivered a wide range of named lectures including the Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University in 2015. In 2013 the University of Aberdeen conferred on him an Honorary D.Litt. He was appointed OBE in 2002.