Thomas S. Davis is Associate Professor of English. He is affiliated faculty with the Sustainability Institute. He also collaborates with After Oil research collective.
His first book The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (Columbia University Press, "Modernist Latitudes Series," 2016), explains why modernist aesthetics took an "outward turn” to everyday life during the geopolitical crises of midcentury. He is finishing his second book, Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis. This book is the first sustained study of “attachment” as a concept in the Energy and Environmental Humanities and as a cultural and aesthetic preoccupation. Attending closely to works by Octavia Butler, Craig Santos Perez, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jeff VanderMeer, Jesmyn Ward, and others, Davis tracks the processes by which attachments are formed and sustained, unmade and diminished. By thickening and clarifying attachment we can begin to see more clearly the relationship between the commitments, relations, and ideas that make life livable and the material conditions that shape and often limit our lives in our era of climate collapse. He is beginning a third book on the relevance of art during moments of crisis that centers on the African-American modernist painter, William H. Johnson.
Davis is the recipient of EUGO’s Professor of the Year award, the Paul W. Brown Award for Undergraduate Teaching, the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Cares and Compassion Award from the Center for Ethics. He has co-directed Environmental Humanities field schools in southern Louisiana and Antarctica. More information and links to essays and podcasts can be found at his personal site: www.thomassdavis.net