Director's Corner

Janet Davis, Director
Professor, American Studies

 

Janet M. Davis is Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1998. She is a specialist in transnational U.S. cultural, social, and environmental history.

Professor Davis received her B.A. in History at Carleton College, where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She is the author of The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the Presidents’ Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in 2018, and The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (UNC Press, 2002), winner of a Choice Outstanding Title Award and the Robert W. Hamilton Book Award runner-up prize. 

She is editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline (University of Illinois Press, 2008). Among her peer-reviewed articles, “Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and Nation Building,” won the 2014 Constance Rourke Prize from the American Studies Association.

Professor Davis has won six teaching awards at UT, including the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. She was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2017. She has supervised thirty Ph.D. dissertations, in addition to serving as a member of eighty-five other dissertation committees at UT and other institutions worldwide. Professor Davis has served as Chair of the Department of American Studies, as well as Associate Director of the Plan II Honors Program.

She has published invited opinion pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. She regularly serves as a public humanities consultant for documentary film and museum exhibitions, including service as a senior humanities advisor for the award-winning two-part series, The Circus, which aired nationally on American Experience on PBS in 2018. She is currently researching and writing her new book, Sharkmania: An American History, which explores human and shark entanglements from the Age of Sail to the Jaws Age. In April 2024, Professor Davis was a residential research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association under the auspices of the E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Professor Davis teaches large lecture survey courses, in addition to specialized interdisciplinary seminars in U.S. cultural and social history, animal studies, environmental history, popular culture, and social movements.

In her free time, Professor Davis enjoys birding, singing to her dogs, playing the piano, and spending time with her family.