David Marshall is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Marshall is Chair of the University of California President's Advisory Committee on Research in the Humanities, which oversees the UC Humanities Network. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance.

David Marshall was a professor at Yale University from 1979 to 1997, serving as Chair of the English Department, Director of The Literature Major, Acting Chair of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, among other appointments. He received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1975 and then went on to receive an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on 18th-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy. He is the author of essays on Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Lennox, Mackenzie, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Hume, and Rilke, among other authors, and three books: The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot; The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley; and The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815. The Frame of Art was awarded the 2005-2006 Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Marshall also has lectured and published on issues in higher education and the humanities.

Marshall was a Guggenheim Fellow and he received Yale's Morse Fellowship. He served on the Editorial Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Advisory Committee for PMLA. Service for the Modern Language Association includes the Committee on Honors and Awards. He also chaired the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Selection Committee and the Division Executive Committee for Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature. He was a member of the Modern Language Association’s Teagle Working Group on the Disciplines and Undergraduate Liberal Education, as well as the AAU/ACLS Humanities Steering Committee.