Rate My Professor Nicholas Davis

Nicholas Davis serves as Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, with appointments in the Literature faculty, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program—where he formerly directed—and a courtesy role in Radio/Television/Film. Holding a Ph.D. from Cornell University, his scholarship centers on narrative film analysis, feminist and gender studies, queer theory, and 20th- and 21st-century American literature. In his acclaimed book, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2013), Davis develops innovative frameworks for understanding queer cinema post-HIV/AIDS, employing Deleuzian concepts of desire and becoming to examine films like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Watermelon Woman, Shortbus, Brother to Brother, Beau travail, and Velvet Goldmine. He has authored essays on works such as Julie Dash's Illusions, Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también, Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s They, William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band, Pixar's The Incredibles, and James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, alongside studies of actresses Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Kristen Stewart.