About
I am Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty at the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University where I teach courses in modern and contemporary literature, Environmental and Energy Humanities, and aesthetic theory. My 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. I am currently writing and researching a new book called Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis. With Nathan K. Hensley, I edited a cluster on “Scale and Form” for Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus Platform. I also edit the new “Energy and Environment” forum for Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus Platform.
My scholarship has appeared in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Twentieth Century Literature, Cultural Dynamics, Literature Compass, and elsewhere. I also have essays in edited volumes such as Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (Routledge, ed. Stephen Ross), Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (University of Notre Dame Press, ed. Kevin Hart), The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (Routledge, eds. Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges), British Literature in Transition: 1940-1960 (Cambridge UP, ed. Gill Plain), and, most recently, Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (University of Minnesota Press, eds. Mary Thomas and Bruce Braun). Some of these essays are linked in the tabs above. If you are interested in any of these essays that are not linked or readily available, please email and I will gladly send you copies.
I am a product of South Carolina where I was born, raised, and lived for the first 21 years of my life. My formative years there were spent in the underground DIY punk and hardcore scene and I learned in raw form—aesthetics and politics, capitalism and culture, autonomy and obligation— much of what I pursued formally in graduate school. Some of the output and ongoing links to that world is posted in “Other” tab above. My formal education was at University of South Carolina (BA), Boston College (MA), and University of Notre Dame (PhD). I have been on faculty at Ohio State since 2008.
Contact: davis.3186@osu.edu
Bluesky: @thomassdavis.bsky.social