Michael David-Fox is a historian of modern Russian and Soviet history. He has published widely on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. He has strong interests in transnational and comparative history and in the history of Russian-German relations, broadly conceived. David-Fox is now working on the history of the Nazi occupation of the USSR during World War II and the history of Stalinism and German occupation in one region, Smolensk.

David-Fox is founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, which is based at Georgetown. He has been a Humboldt Fellow (Germany), a visiting professor at the Centre russe, EHESS (France), and holds the title of honorary professor at Samara State University (Russia). He has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the W. Averill Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the Mershon Center for Studies in International Security and Public Policy, the National Academy of Education, the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

David-Fox maintains scholarly interests in source criticism, historiography, and the history of Russian Studies. In his writing and his teaching, he delights in establishing and probing often unexpected connections: between culture and politics, institutions and mentalities, or domestic and international developments.