B.A., Texas (Austin); M.A., Ph.D., Vanderbilt

Professor Davidson is author of T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in "The Waste Land" (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), editor of the Longman Reader on T.S. Eliot (Longman Publishing Group, 1999), and the author of numerous articles on poetry, theory and feminism.  She was Director of Women's Studies for six years, inaugurating in 2001 a new department and Ph.D. program in Women's and Gender Studies in 2001; and in 1997 she organized the Rutgers conference "Poetry and the Public Sphere."  Her current work explores the cultural function of poetry, theories of witnessing, feminist aesthetic theories, and postmodernism.

Modern Poetry

Poetry by Women

Feminist Theory

Contemporary American Poetry

Introduction to Literary Theory

Close Reading

Introduction to Twentieth-Century Studies
Poetry and Postmodernism

Critical Theory

Introduction to Literary Theory

Later Twentieth-Century Poetry

The Criticism of Poetry