David Ashford is a poet, cultural historian, publisher and professor of English Literature. His research specialisms include Modernism, philosophy and cultural geography.

He is the author of a cultural geography on the London Underground (Liverpool University Press, 2013), which explores the role that writers, artists and architects have played in the development of new types of urban space in London from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
His second book was Autarchies: The Invention of Selfishness (Bloomsbury, 2017), a reception history which traced the influence of egoist philosopher Max Stirner on Modernist writers and artists in France, Russia, the United States and United Kingdom in the years running up to WWI.
A third monograph – A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture – was published in summer 2024, which expands upon material that has appeared in journals as the essays “Gorillas in the House of Light” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2011), “Architects of the Occult” (Literary London: 2014), “The Mechanical Turk” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2017), and “Orc-Talk” (JFA: 2018).
David is also a published poet with three short collections published by innovative small-press poetry-publisher Veer: Xaragmata (2013), Orcs!!! (2015), and Sedition Machines (2017). John Company, an experiment in Modernist open-field poetics (on the British East India Company) was published by Pamenar Press in 2021.
David is editor-in-chief at the poetry small-press Contraband, which has published some of the most significant writers of the British Poetry Revival. He currently teaches English Literature at the University of Groningen.