David Lewis comes from Donaghadee on the Ards Peninsula and joined the University of Edinburgh Classics Department as lecturer in August 2018 (promoted to senior lecturer August 2022). He trained at the University of Durham, gaining the PhD in 2012, and then held a research fellowship in Edinburgh (2013–15) followed by a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship (also at Edinburgh: 2015–16). He then spent two years back in England as Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham (2016–18).
His research focuses on the economy and society of ancient Greece, with a special interest in slavery. He co-edited (with Edward Harris and Mark Woolmer) The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and (with Edmund Stewart and Edward Harris) Skilled Labour and Professionalism in Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge University Press 2020). His monograph Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800–146 BC was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He currently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung experienced researcher grant (12 months, split across the summers of 2025, 2026, and 2027), during which he is researching for a second monograph, provisionally entitled Doleful Merchandise: Slave Trade and Society in the Ancient Greek World.