Educator, Author, Advocate
Cathy N. Davidson is the award-winning author or editor of over twenty books, and has taught at a range of institutions, from community college to the Ivy League. Davidson is the Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), a role in which she works with all twenty-five campuses serving over 275,000 students. Within the Graduate Center, She is also the Founding Director of the Futures Initiative and is a Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D Program in the English, as well as in the M.A. in Digital Humanities, and the M.S. in Data Analysis and Visualization programs. She held two distinguished professor chairs at Duke University, where she taught for twenty-five years and also became the university’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. Davidson is co-founder and co-director of “the world’s first and oldest academic social network,” the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC.org, known as “Haystack”), which has over 18,000 network members.
Davidson’s many prizewinning books include the classics like Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford University Press, 2004), Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, (Duke University Press, 2006), and Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Norton, 1999, with photographer Bill Bamberger). Most recently, she has concentrated on the science of learning in the “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking/Penguin 2017); The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books, 2017; reissued in paperback, 2022); and, co-authored with Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022). Both The New Education and The New College Classroom were awarded the Frederick W. Ness annual book prize from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). She is the first person to receive the Ness award twice since its inception in 1979.
Davidson has won many other awards, prizes, and grants throughout her career including from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, NSF, and the MacArthur Foundation. She received the Educator of the Year Award from the World Technology Network in 2012, and was the 2016 recipient of the Ernest L. Boyer Award for “significant contributions to higher education.” In 2021, the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences presented Davidson with its annual Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award. She has served on the board of directors of Mozilla (2012-18), was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities (2011-17), and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning (2019, 2020).
