David A. Davis
Director of Fellowships and Scholarships,
Associate Professor of English, and Associate Director of the Spencer B. King, Jr., Center for Southern Studies

Originally from Butler, Georgia, David A. Davis attended Emory University (B.A. 1997) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D. 2006).

He studies southern literature and culture, and he teaches courses in American literature and southern studies. He is the author of World War I and Southern Modernism (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, forthcoming), and he has published essays and review essays in African American Review, American Quarterly, Journal of American Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Southern Quarterly, Southern Literary Journal, and other journals. He edited a reprint of Victor Daly's novel Not Only War: A Story of Two Great Conflicts (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010) and a reprint of John L. Spivak's novel Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang: Originally Published as Georgia Nigger (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2012). He co-edited Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways with Tara Powell (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014). Currently, he is writing a book on sharecropping and southern literature. He is chair of the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature committee, faculty advisor to the Stamps Scholars Society, and editor of The Malcolm Lester Phi Beta Kappa Lectures on Liberal Arts and Public Life.

He lives in Macon with his wife, Kris; two sons, Lucas and Ayden; and three mutts.

 
David A. Davis

Curriculum Vitae

Honors House 101
(478) 301-2358
davis_da@mercer.edu

Recent Courses

FYS 102: Civil Rights Activism
INT 101: Food Politics
INT 201: Animal Studies

ENG/SST 236: Southern Foodways
ENG/SST 236: Civil War Memory
ENG/SST 236: Southern Justice
ENG/SST 236: The Civil Rights Movement
ENG 301: Literary Research and Interpretation
ENG 354: Rise and Fall of the American Empire
ENG 357: Cotton Kingdom

ENG 358: Poor White Southerners
ENG 358: Death in the South
ENG 358: Literature of the Civil Rights Movement
ENG 366: Modern Times
ENG 380: Southern Autobiography

Selected Publications

  • “Modernism in Mississippi.” A Literary History of Mississippi. Edited by Lorie Watkins. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 102-115.
  • “Faulkner and the Inheritors of Slavery.” Fifty Years after Faulkner. Edited by Jay Watson and Ann Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
  • "The Irony of Southern Modernism," Journal of American Studies 49.3 (August 2015): 457-474.
  • “Southern Modernists and Modernity.” A Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. Edited by Sharon Monteith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • “Abjection and White Trash Autobiography.” Master Narratives: Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South. Edited by Jason Phillips. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.
  • “The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ Traumatic Memory, and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918.” Southern Literary Journal 63.2 (Spring 2011): 54-73.
  • I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! and the Materiality of Southern Depravity.” Mississippi Quarterly 63.3-4 (Summer-Fall 2010): 399-418.
  • “Sinners in the Temple: Transgression of Social Space in Sanctuary.” Mosaic 43.4 (December 2010): 141-156.
  • “Not Only War is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives.” African American Review 42.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2008): 477-491.