Rate My Professor Mark Davis

Professor Mark Davis is Professor of Publishing and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in English and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2003. Davis serves as Co-Director and Lead Researcher for the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Contemporary Culture (ERCC) research group. Previously, he directed the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences from 2010. His research specializations encompass the interplay between media and public culture, focusing on digital platforms and the culture wars, online anti-publics and the mainstreaming of extremism, soft nationalism and cyber-nationalism, Australian digital literary cultures and taste-making, changing media ecologies and the cultural politics of gatekeeping and disintermediation, Australian public culture, media representations of young people, and the global book publishing industry amid the transition from print capitalism to platform capitalism. He leads projects investigating post-digital literary cultures, the destabilization of the literary-print field by digital media, and online anti-publics including alt-right, neo-reactionary groups, anti-vaccination groups, anti-climate-science groups, and white nationalist communities that oppose democratic, scientific, and enlightenment principles.

Davis has authored seminal works such as Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism (1999), The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (2008), and co-edited More Than Luck: Ideas Australia Needs Now (2010). Notable publications include 'The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing,' 'The online anti-public sphere' (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020), University of Melbourne Book Industry Study (2009), 'After Christchurch: Alt-right Discourse and Ideology in Australia and the Platformisation of Extremism' (2022), 'Soft nationalism and China: A case study of nationalism in short videos by US-Chinese rapper MC Jin' (2023), 'E-extremism: A conceptual framework for studying the online far right' (2024), and 'Violence as method: the “white replacement”, “white genocide”, and “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and the biopolitics of networked violence' (2024). He has served as Chief Investigator on five nationally funded grants, including ARC projects on extremism, and has published extensively in leading international journals and mainstream media, contributing to public discourse on the impacts of networked digital media on democratic culture and the alt-right's influence in Australia.