DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Nick Davis (he/him/his) researches and teaches in the areas of narrative film analysis, feminist and gender studies, queer theory, and 20th/21st-century American literature, while also maintaining an active role in Chicago movie culture and in film reviewing for wide audiences.

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 direct 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 unstable politics, without presuming prior familiarity with Deleuze. 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 actresses Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Kristen Stewart.

Forthcoming academic work includes a book on Mike Mills’s movie 20th Century Women (for University of Texas Press) and a longer study, provisionally titled Millennium Approached: Reframing the Movies of 1999, that examines aesthetic trends, reception patterns, and cultural preoccupations in U.S. and world cinema on the eve of Y2K. Since 1998, he has published over 1,300 film reviews and essays at www.Nick-Davis.com. For four years he was a Contributing Editor at Film Comment Magazine, and he is now an Associate Programmer with the Chicago International Film Festival, which sponsors his free, hour-long downtown lectures each month from September through June, about a current release, major director, or national film tradition.

Nick is permanently co-appointed in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program (of which he is a past Director) and holds a courtesy appointment in Radio/Television/Film, where he advises several students pursuing the Ph.D. in Screen Cultures. He regularly teaches a seminar called "Queer Theory and Queer Cinema" at the graduate level. His wide range of undergraduate courses include "Introduction to Film and Its Literatures," "Close-Reading Contemporary Cinema," "Introducing Queer Cinema," "Introducing Trans Cinema," "Henry James and Film," "The Film Review as Genre," "Introduction to 20th Century American Literature," and a range of first-year seminars that each explore diverse cinematic productions drawn from one calendar year. He regularly teaches courses and advises theses for the M.A. in Literature through Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies and leads classes about every other year in 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)