Rate My Professor Alexander Davis

Alexander E. Davis is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations within the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. He holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Tasmania and a PhD in International Studies from the University of Adelaide. Following completion of his doctorate, Davis held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Johannesburg and La Trobe University in Melbourne before taking up his current role at UWA. From January 2021 to December 2022, he also served as a Non-Resident Fellow at the National University of Singapore.

Davis's research investigates international relations from historical, critical, and postcolonial perspectives, with a primary emphasis on South Asia, particularly the geopolitics and ecology of the Himalaya. This includes the politics of infrastructure projects, climate change, borders and borderlands, tourism, identity, heritage, nationalism, and cultural transformations in the region. He engages critical international relations theory incorporating feminism, postcolonialism, and the more-than-human turn, alongside insights from human geography, anthropology, sociology, and history. Secondary research interests encompass the Indian diaspora in India-Australia relations and decolonising Australia's international relations. As head of the Australian Himalaya Research Network and a foundation member of the New International Histories of South Asia network, Davis contributes significantly to these fields. His key publications include the sole-authored monograph The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains: An International Political Ecology of the Himalaya (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), India and the Anglosphere: Race, Identity and Hierarchy in International Relations, and co-authored The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (Pluto Press, 2020, with Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale). Recent chapters feature "Bordering Ladakh, Again: From Ecological Flows to Cartographic Competition" (2024, with Ruth Gamble, Asian Studies Review), "Territorializing Rivers" (2024, with Dorje Palmo), and "The Geopolitics of Riverine Climes in Eastern Himalayas: The Brahmaputra-Yarlung Tsangpo and the India-China Border conflict" (2024). Davis has received the School of Social Sciences Commendation for Early-Career Research Award (2023), Commendation for Teaching Excellence Award (2023), and the Boyer Prize (2022).