DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Nick Davis (he/him/his) researches and teaches in the areas of narrative film, feminist and gender studies, queer theory, and 20th/21st-century American literature. His publication record, teaching areas, conference presentations, and community involvements all sit at the intersection of academic film studies and public movie culture.

Over time, Nick has published essays on Julie Dash's Illusions, Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también, Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band, Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s They, Pixar's The Incredibles, James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, and the careers of such actresses as Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Kristen Stewart. Nick’s book The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2013) theorized new models of queer cinema in the historical wake of HIV/AIDS, based more on formal and conceptual principles than straightforward identity claims. The book's ideas and its readings of films like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Watermelon Woman, Shortbus, Brother to Brother, Beau travail, and Velvet Goldmine draw heavily on Deleuzian philosophies of cinema, desire, collective becomings, and their unstable politics, without presuming too much prior familiarity.

Forthcoming academic work includes a short book on Mike Mills’s movie 20th Century Women and a longer study, provisionally titled Millennium Approached: Reframing the Movies of 1999, that examines a series of aesthetic trends, reception patterns, and cultural preoccupations in U.S. and world cinema on the eve of Y2K. Since 1998, he has been the author of over 1,300 film reviews and essays at www.Nick-Davis.com. For four years he was also a Contributing Editor at Film Comment Magazine.

Nick, who is permanently co-appointed in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and holds a courtesy appointment in Radio/Television/Film, regularly teaches a seminar called "Queer Theory and Queer Cinema" at the graduate level. His wide range of undergraduate courses including "Introduction to Film and Its Literatures," "Close-Reading Contemporary Cinema," "Introducing Queer Cinema," "Introducing Trans Cinema," "Writing About Film," "Henry James and Film," "The Film Review as Genre," "Sexual Subjects," "Introduction to 20th Century American Literature," and a range of seminars that each explore diverse cinematic productions drawn from one calendar year. He also regularly teaches courses for the M.A. in Literature through Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies and the NU Alumnae’s Continuing Education Program. From 2017-2020, he held the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professorship, one of the University’s highest awards for distinguished teaching and curricular innovation.

Specializations

Gender & Sexuality Studies, 20th- & 21st-century American Literature, Film & Film Theory

Books

The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema  (Oxford University Press, 2013)