Thomas S. Davis researches and teaches in the areas of modern and contemporary literature, Energy and Environmental Humanities, and aesthetics.  He is affiliated faculty with the Sustainability Institute and collaborates with OSU’s Environmental History Initative.  He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group.

 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.  This book was as finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2017.  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. 

 His research has been published in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, Textual Practice, English Language Notes, Cultural Dynamics, Literature Compass, Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus Platform, Energy Humanities, and elsewhere.  He has essays in a range of edited volumes, including 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), Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (University of Minnesota Press, eds. Mary Thomas and Bruce Braun), The Cambridge Companion to Late Modernism (forthcoming), and The Cambridge History of Caribbean Modernism (forthcoming). 

 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 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.