Rate My Professor Theo Davis

Theo Davis is Chair and Professor of English in the Department of English at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from Johns Hopkins University in 2002, following an MA from the same institution in 1999, and a BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University in 1994, graduating magna cum laude. Davis began her academic career as Assistant Professor of English at Williams College from 2002 to 2008, advanced to Associate Professor there from 2008 to 2012, then joined Northeastern University as Associate Professor of English from 2012 to 2017, and was promoted to Professor in 2017.

Her research centers on nineteenth-century American literature, aesthetics, literary theory, attachment theory, and embodied intelligence. Davis authored Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2017. Her forthcoming book, Organizing Relation: Attachment Theory and Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press), examines systems-based learning in attachment theory through readings of nineteenth-century American literature. She has published articles in journals including American Literary History, ELH, and Novel, such as “Despair, Blurriness, and Change: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Implicit Relational Knowing” (ALH, 2024) and “Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity” (ALH, 2019). Davis received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2018-2019 to work on Sensations of Freedom. She served on the editorial board of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists from 2016 to 2019 and has delivered invited lectures at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and others.