Cynthia Davis

Associate Professor
Undergraduate Director

Office: 506 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2345
cjdavis@sc.edu

Current CV

Education

Ph.D., English Literature, Duke University, 1994.

Specialization Areas

• American literature;
• American literary realism and naturalism;
• American women writers

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

Current Research Project(s)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Living, biography, under advance contract with Stanford University Press, 2007.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman And Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, co-edited with Denise D. Knight, under contract with University of Alabama Press, forthcoming February 2004.

Publications

Approaches to Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland, co-edited with Denise D. Knight, MLA Publications, 2003.

Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915, Stanford University Press, December, 2000.

Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline of Literary, Cultural and Social History, co-authored with Kathryn West, Oxford University Press, April, 1996.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“His and Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman “Re-presents” Lester F. Ward.” Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature, eds. Claire Roche and Lois Cuddy. Bucknell UP, 2003.

“The Doctor is In: Medical Insight, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Elsie Venner,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24.2, June 2002.

“Contagion as Metaphor,” Invited Commentary for Special Issue of American Literary History on Contagion and Culture, December, 2002.

"Margaret Fuller, Body and Soul," American Literature, March, 1999.

"B(e)aring It All: Talking about Sex and Self on Television Talk Shows," Confessional Politics, ed. Irene Gammel, Southern Illinois University Press, March, 1999.

"Nation's Nature: ?Billy Budd, Sailor,' Anglo-Saxonism, and the Canon," in Race and the Construction of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, general ed. William Cain, Garland Press's Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture, December, 1998.

"Making the Strange(r) Familiar: Sarah Orne Jewett's 'The Foreigner,'" in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Regional Fiction, ed. Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, University of Iowa Press, October, 1997.

"The Body in Pain: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig," African American Review, Fall, 1993.