Sam Davis
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Sam Davis is a trans critical theorist, educator, literary scholar, filmmaker, musician, and current doctoral student in the UMass Amherst English department. His doctoral research aims to forge an alternative Trans Literary history through anti-Humanist Black Feminist literature, studying authors like Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison. Sam currently teaches in the First Year Experience department at Barnard College, as well as in the English department at UMass Amherst.
His new research project explores the long arch of trans history at the Seven Sisters women's colleges, and how womanhood has been shaped, policed, and surveilled over time. The project combines trans oral histories and deep archival research to study how the continuing evolution of womanhood is negotiated by historically women's spaces. Sam’s auto-ethnographic documentary on this topic, "In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith" (2017) has received various awards, including the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize at Smith College, as well as being the Feature Film at GLAAD’s Spring Film Festival in 2018.
His research interests are Queer and Trans studies, Black studies, Disability studies, Critical Social Theory, and Contemporary American Literature.
- Ph.D. candidate in English at UMass Amherst
- M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University
- B.A. in Gender studies and Economics from Smith College