David is a teacher, writer, and translator whose work explores language and power so as to grasp what it costs a person to navigate a world that wasn't built for them. David is Professor of Multilingual Humanities at the University of British Columbia and has published eight books, including The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016), winner of the American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2024). His co-edited volume Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (UC Press, 2007) has become a standard teaching text on migration and multiculturalism in contemporary Germany. David is also a literary translator, working primarily from Turkish and German, with authors including Kemal Varol, Murathan Mungan, Ayşegül Savaş, and Sabahattin Ali.

David grew up in central Massachusetts with ocular albinism — a genetic visual condition that shaped — in ways he spent twenty-five years writing around rather than about — his entire relationship to language, perception, and other people. Aloof: On Seeing Less than You Should is the book that finally turns that lens inward.

David lives in Vancouver's Gastown neighbourhood and spends summers on Cape Cod and sometimes in Germany.