Theo Davis
Chair and Professor of English
Theo Davis’ recent book, Organizing Relation: Attachment Theory and Literary Criticism (Oxford UP 2026) explicates attachment theory’s grounding in dynamic systems theory and explores how its principles of intersubjectivity and embodied learning reshape key ideas about humanistic learning and connection. Davis is now working on a book about practices of somatic awareness, exploring the teachings of embodied presence and reflecting on what it means to be present in relation to images and texts.
- Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2018-2019
- “Ornamental Aesthetics” chosen 2017 Outstanding Academic Title, “Choice”
- Organizing Relation: Attachment Theory and Literary Criticism (Oxford UP 2026)
- “What Is It You Want to Learn?’: Somatic Awareness in the Tradition of Elsa Gindler,” Theory & Event 29.2 (April 2026): 217-297.
- “Despair, Blurriness, and Change: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Implicit Relational Knowing,” ALH 36.4 (Winter 2024): 995-1015.
- “Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity,” ALH 31.3 (Fall 2019): 369-394.
- Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.
- Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge Univ. 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 only
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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.
