David Starr Newbury (born 1942) is the Gwendolen Carter professor of African studies at Smith College, Massachusetts. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1979 for thesis titled "Kings and clans on Ijwi Island (Zaire), c. 1780-1840" under the supervision of Jan Vansina. His academic work has three major foci within East and Central Africa. The first was pre-colonial societal transformation in the Kivu Rift Valley. The second was how a Rwandan famine in the late 1920s reinforced colonial rule. The final major focus was the transformation of a hunter-gatherer society in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo into an agricultural economy. His recent work has included studies of the historical roots of Central African violence in the late 1990s to present. René Lemarchand states, "No attempt to grasp the historical context of genocide [in Rwanda] can ignore Catherine and David Newbury’s seminal contributions."