Heather Davis is Assistant Professor and Director of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Davis is the author of over 80 articles, book chapters, reviews, and catalogue essays. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Slovak. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and editor of the award-winning Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017). Davis’ work has been supported through numerous fellowships, residencies and awards including the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, membership in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, a GIDEST faculty fellowship, a residency at the Fondation Grantham, a Mellon Visiting Scholar in the Environmental Humanities at the Center for Environmental Futures, University of Oregon, a Critical Studies Teaching Fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University. Davis is an active member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
She can be reached at davish1 [at] newschool [dot] edu