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) won the ALECC Alanna Bondar Literary Prize in 2024. Plastic Matter argues that plastic has transformed the world because of its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. 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). Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. 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