David Hart began teaching in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide, South Australia in 1986, received the university teaching prize in 1992, and was tenured in 1994. Subjects taught and areas of graduate research supervised include modern European history, nineteenth-century classical liberal thought, the Enlightenment, war and culture, film and history, history and the Internet- all of which went online from 1996 onwards. His philosophy of teaching can be summed up in two basic principles - the Maoist principle of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and the idea that teaching is fundamentally an intellectually subversive process.

He received a B.A. in history from Macquarie University in Sydney (writing a final year Honours thesis on the radical liberalism of the Frenchman Gustave de Molinari) and spent a year at the University of Mainz, Federal Republic of Germany, studying the origins of the First World War and German liberalism. He earned an M.A. in history from Stanford University and worked on student programs for the Institute for Humane Studies when it was located at Menlo Park, California where he was founding editor of Humane Studies Review. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge (attending "King's College" - even though he is a Painite republican) for his thesis on Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and early 19th century French liberal thought.

He is married with 11 year old twins and used to live on the beach in Adelaide. The twins, a boy and a girl, provide him with the scientific data to speak authoritatively on gender differences and the human being's natural proclivity towards liberty (and digging holes).

Teaching in a pre-WWW era