History Department

Education

• Ph.D., Geography, UC Berkeley.
• DVM, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine

About

Diana Davis is a geographer and veterinarian who specializes in geography, environmental history and political ecology with a special emphasis on the arid lands of the globe. She is a professor in the History Department and Chair of the Geography Graduate Group.

Research Focus

Political Ecology; Environmental History; Pastoral Societies and Arid Lands; Colonialism/Imperialism; Medical Geography; Environmental Change and Public Health; Ethnoveterinary Medicine; and the Middle East and North Africa..

Publications

• Davis, D.K. (2021) "Deserting Arboreal (Bio)Politics," pp. 41-54 in Manual for a Future Desert, Ida Soulard, Abinadi Meza and Bassam El Baroni, Eds. Milan: Mousse Publishing.

• Davis, D.K. (2020) "Of Deserts and Decolonization: Dispelling Myths about Drylands" MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/dispelling-myths-about-drylands/.

• Davis, D.K. (2019) "From the Divine to the Desertified: The Foundational Case of Deserts in the Middle East," Global Environments, 12 (1): 56-83.

• Davis, D.K. and P. Robbins (2018) "Pathological Ecologies of the Colonial Present: From the 'Taux de Boisement' to Contemporary Forestry” with Paul Robbins, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space,
  1(4): 447-469.

• Davis, D. K. (2018) "Between Sand and Sea: Constructing Mediterranean Plant Ecology" pp. 129-151 in The Handbook of Critical Physical Geography, R. Lave, et. al., Ed. Palgrave.

• Sayre, N., D.K. Davis, B. Bestelmeyer and J.C. Williamson (2017) "Rangelands: Where Anthromes meet their Limits," Land, 62(3), 31; doi:10.3390/ land6020031.

• Davis, D. K. (2016) The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• Davis, D. K. (2015) "Historical Approaches to Political cology," Ch. 20, pp. 263-275 in the Handbook of Political Ecology, Bridge, Gavin, James McCarthy and Tom Perrault (Eds.) Routledge.
• Davis, D. K. (2012) Les mythes environnementaux de la colonisation française au Maghreb, Éditions Champ Vallon, Seyssel.
• Davis, D. K. & Burke, E. (Eds.) (2011) Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio .
• Davis, D. K. (2007) Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonia Expansion in North Africa, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio.

Teaching

HIS/SAS 109: Environmental Change, Disease and Public Health; GDB 106: Geographies of (One)Health; HIS 107: Medicine's Histories; HIS 108: Global Environmental History; GEO 260: Global Political Ecology; GEO 200AN: Geographic Concepts: Histories of Geographic Thought.

Awards

• Guggenheim Fellowship, Ryskamp Research Fellowship (ACLS) , NEH Summer Fellowship, Millstone Fellowship, EPA STAR fellowship.
• Book Prizes: Marsh Prize , Meridian Award & Blaut Award, 2008, for Resurrecting the Granary of Rome.