Theo Davis
Chair and Professor of English
Professor Davis’s current book project, Attachment Styles, is an interdisciplinary work connecting attachment theory and literary studies. It looks at matters of dissociation, relationality, cybernetic theory, and attunement in figures in psychology including Pierre Janet, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Patricia Crittenden, Daniel Stern, Peter Fonagy, and Allan Schore. Exploring the field’s interest to humanities scholars, it suggests the power here of a new sense of attuned, relational presence.
- Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2018-2019
- “Ornamental Aesthetics” chosen 2017 Outstanding Academic Title, “Choice”
- “Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity,” ALH 31.3 (Fall 2019): 369-394.
- Ornamental Aesthetics: Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)
- “Interpreting the Survey,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Vol 4.1 (Spring 2016): 160-64
- “Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the Dharma,” in American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, ed. Branka Arsiç (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- “Opening Up Close Reading: Melville and Decorative Aesthetics,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- “Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Excrescences’: Aesthetics and Politics in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Theory & Event 13: 4 (2010): n.p.
- Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Education
PhD in English and American Literature, 2002, Johns Hopkins University
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Contact
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Address
407 Lake Hall
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 -
Office Hours
By appointment
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Proseminar
ENGL 5103
Introduces the history and current scholarly practices of English studies. Surveys theoretical, methodological, and institutional issues in the development of the discipline; introduces students to the research of the English department’s graduate faculty; and offers opportunities for the practice of key components of scholarly production, including formulating research questions, using databases, conducting literature reviews, and writing and presenting scholarship in common formats other than the long research paper, such as conference proposals, oral presentations, and book reviews.
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The American Renaissance
ENGL 2330
Studies the nineteenth-century development of an American national literary tradition in the context of democratic and romantic attitudes toward experience, nation formation, and national crisis. Includes such writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, and Melville.
Emerson and Thoreau
ENGL 3619
Focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two major American Romantic writers whose ideas about the individual, spirituality, nature, and politics have had a wide-ranging impact on American culture. Readings include essays, poetry, and journals by these two Massachusetts-based authors.
