David Abulafia is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University, where he has spent his entire career, and Papathomas Professorial Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
He is also visiting Beacon Professor at the newly-founded University of Gibraltar. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Academia Europaea. Among his books, most of which have concerned the history of the Mediterranean, are the best-selling The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean, published by Penguin Books, which won the British Academy Medal and the Mountbatten Maritime Award, which has been translated into twelve languages, with more to follow. His latest book is The Boundless Sea: a Human History of the Oceans, also for Penguin Books, published in 2019. It has won the Wolfson History Prize for 2020, the largest non-fiction book prize in the UK.
He is now writing about several other seas that have played an important role in human history, such as the Black Sea.