Professor Davis is the author of The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), the winner of the 2018 Presidents’ Book Award from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; and a 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Professor Davis is also the author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), the winner of a 2003 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award; the Robert W. Hamilton Book Award; and a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. Professor Davis is also the editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Life of Tiny Kline (University of Illinois Press, 2008), by Tiny Kline. Professor Davis’s current book project is a transnational cultural and environmental history of human/shark entanglements, tentatively titled, “’Jawsmania’: A History.” She is also researching and writing a transnational history of American humane education, and a cultural biography of the Texas circus impresario, Mollie Bailey. Professor Davis works regularly as a consultant for museum exhibitions and documentary films, including American Experience on PBS and the Smithsonian’s 2017 American Folklife Festival. She has received fellowships from FLAS VI in Hindi, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Davis’s article, “Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of Empire and Nation Building,” won the 2014 Constance M. Rourke Prize for the best article published in American Quarterly.
Janet Davis
