Cathy Davidson

Cathy Davidson

Cathy Davidson, portrait by Artie Dixon

Cathy N. Davidson (born 1949) is an American scholar and university professor. She has served as the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University since 1996 and has held a second distinguished chair as the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies since 2006. She has served in leadership roles at Duke and a variety of organizations and has authored or edited eighteen books. Her work for the last decade has focused on technology, collaboration, cognition, learning, and the digital age.

Background and education

Davidson was born in Chicago, received her B.A. from Elmhurst College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Binghamton University. She also did postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago and has received honorary doctorates from Elmhurst College and Northwestern University. Prior to joining the faculty of Duke, Davidson was a professor of English at Michigan State University.

Career

Davidson served as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University from 1998 to 2006, in which capacity she had administrative responsibility for over sixty research programs operating between and among Duke’s nine academic and professional schools. She was responsible for innovative design of technologies for research, teaching, and learning and, in 1999, helped create ISIS (the program in Information Science + Information Studies) at Duke, a leader in the Duke Digital Initiative and convener of the first-ever academic podcasting conference.

In 2003, Davidson initiated a program at Duke, in conjunction with Apple, to give free iPods to each member of the incoming class with no other requirements. This sparked harsh criticism and ridicule from the academic community and news media. The program was viewed as a success by Davidson, however, since it led to new applications for the iPod in an educational environment and inspired a new initiative among Duke students to innovate and collaborate., ,

During her time as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Davidson worked with colleagues to help create the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Davidson serves on the Board of Advisors to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Digital Media and Learning" book series. She is a former President of the American Studies Association and former editor of the journal American Literature. She lectures and consults widely on interdisciplinary, collaboration, digital literacy, virtual communities, and innovative learning-applications of new technologies.

During the 2009-10 academic year, Dr. Davidson chaired Duke University's Digital Futures Task Force, whose university-wide open-access policy was unanimously accepted by Duke's Academic Council in March 2010. In 2010, President Obama nominated her to a six-year term on the National Council on the Humanities, a position confirmed by the Senate in July 2011.

HASTAC

In 2002, Davidson co-founded (with David Theo Goldberg) the virtual organization HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an international organization dedicated to rethinking the future of learning for the information age.

Duke lacrosse controversy

Davidson was one of the 88 signatories of a controversial advertisement published by members of Duke's faculty and staff on allegations made against players of the Duke lacrosse team. The Group of 88, as it became known, assumed culpability of members of Duke lacrosse team that had been falsely accused of rape. In a subsequent article, Davidson tried to justify her support for the ad, a move that was equally criticised.,

Books and publications

Davidson is the author or editor of eighteen books. Among the most recent is Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (a collaboration with documentary photographer Bill Bamberger), recipient of the Mayflower Cup Award for Non-Fiction. The photographs from Closing traveled to museums around the U.S. for four years, including to the Smithsonian Museum of American History where the exhibit was viewed by over three million visitors.

Other publications include: Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford, 1986; Expanded edition 2004), Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Hopkins, 1989), The Book of Love: Writers and Their Love Letters (Pocket/Simon and Schuster, 1992), Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan (Dutton/Penguin, 1993; expanded edition, Duke U Press, 2004), and, with Linda Wagner-Martin, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995) and The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

She served as General Editor of the Oxford University Press Early American Women Writers Series and, with Ada Norris, edited American Indian Stories, Legends and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa, the first Penguin Classic devoted to a Native American author.

Davidson has also published on Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century former slave, writer, and abolitionist. Her Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself was featured in the Fall 2006/Spring 2007 issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

In 2010, the Raleigh News & Observer reported on Davidson's newest innovation: having her students grade one another, instead of grading them herself.

Her most recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, published by Viking Press in August 2011, was named by Publishers Weekly "one of the top ten science books" of the Fall 2011 season.