BIOGRAPHY

Professor Harriet Davidson earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. Joining Rutgers in 1984 as an Assistant Professor of English, she has taught forty different undergraduate and graduate courses, including Poetry and Feminism, Art and Activism, and Literature and Culture of the American Fifties. Her teaching has earned her Rutgers’ top awards: the Warren Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Graduate School Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Dr. Davidson’s courses reflect the focus of her scholarly work. Her first book focused on T. S. Eliot, and she is at work on a new study, Out of Breath: Poetry, Gender and the Public Sphere. She has published on contemporary poetry, especially by Adrienne Rich and other women writers, and has organized two major poetry conferences at Rutgers. She has been a Fellow at both the Institute for Research on Women and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture.

Professor Davidson has also been an inexhaustible campus leader, serving on numerous university and Douglass committees and most recently directing the Department of English’s undergraduate Honors Program. Chair of the Women’s Studies Program from 1995 to 2001, she was instrumental in leading the unit toward departmental status and in establishing its Ph.D. program; the department is now one of the best in the nation. In 2006, she served as co-chair of the Douglass Residential College Task Force. Currently, she chairs the Douglass Residential College Advisory Committee.