David Bennett

David Stephen Bennett is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at Kennesaw State University, where he teaches surveys of United States history alongside upper-level and special-topics courses in digital and public history. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University in 2020, with concentrations in United States history; African American history; and the history of science, technology, and medicine. At Michigan State he studied modern American history with Dr. Michael Stamm and Dr. Kirsten Fermaglich, African American history with Dr. Pero Dagbovie, and the history of science, medicine, and technology with Dr. Helen Veit. He completed his M.A. in History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2010, where he served as editor-in-chief of the department journal and earned a number of honors and awards, and he holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the same institution, with minors in Humanities and Religious Studies and extensive additional coursework in history.

His dissertation, Framing Atlanta: Local Newspapers' Search for a Nationally Appealing Racial Image (1920-1960), interrogates Atlanta media and civil rights history across four decades and received the American Journalism Historians Association's Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize in 2021. He is currently revising that work for publication, and it is under review at the University of Georgia Press as Framing Atlanta: Local Media's White Supremacist Disinformation Campaign During the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. His earlier M.A. thesis, Birth of a Virtual Battleground: Television and the Desegregation Crises of 1957 and 1960, was the university's nominee for the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools Master's Thesis Award in Social Sciences.

Bennett's research investigates the news media's representation of urban identity during the civil rights era, work that has earned the Madison A. Kuhn Award, the Stuart A. Rose Library Fellowship at Emory University, the Hugh F. Rankin Prize, and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Michigan State University, among other honors. His article "The Televised Revolution: 'Progressive' Television Coverage of the 1960 New Orleans School Desegregation Crisis" appeared in the Journal of Louisiana History, which also published his review of Darryl Mace's In Remembrance of Emmett Till; his review of Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield's Journalism and Jim Crow appeared in the Atlanta Studies Journal. As a graduate student he helped digitize records for the Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive, an effort funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has worked alongside scholars including Dr. Michael Stamm, Dr. Peter Beattie, Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Dr. Charles Keith.

Across a teaching career spanning Michigan State University, Lake Superior State University, the University of North Florida, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, South Louisiana Community College, and now Kennesaw State, Bennett has increasingly turned toward digital pedagogy and educational game design as tools for teaching historical thinking. At Kennesaw State he designed and now teaches a new Digital History course built to draw majors and non-majors alike into the practice of building public-facing history, and he founded the student Media History Club (since renamed the Digital History Club) to mentor undergraduates through their own research and digital projects. That mentorship has begun to reach wider audiences: one student, Andrew Bramlett, published research on the Atlanta Georgian in the Atlanta Studies Journal and was named a finalist for the KSU Undergraduate Research Award. Much of Bennett's recent work has gone into a suite of interactive teaching platforms that reframe how students encounter primary sources, casting them as historians who assemble evidence into arguments rather than passive readers of assigned documents. Those platforms, together with his mapping and database work in media history, are aggregated among the digital public history projects featured on his personal website.