Benjamin Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M Univeristy. He is also a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University.
Davis writes about the space between law and ethics in contexts marked by coloniality, focusing on legal structures of dispossession as well as the practices of resistance and belonging that create alternative worlds of meaning. His academic research is inspired by a small group of Caribbean philosophers who inherited colonial concepts and maps and re-purposed them with a view toward human freedom. In this spirit, his books present new accounts of key political figures and terms from the 20th century to address this century’s global problems.
In Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy, he describes how Weil’s attentive practice of philosophy led her to become one of the first Europeans to call into question her country’s colonialism. In Choose Your Bearing, he shows how activists leverage claims to human rights not only to change laws but also to outline deeper webs of responsibility. In Another Humanity, he defends what he calls the “conceptual sufficiency” of humanity as an organizing frame for decolonial ethics in the face of state displacement. Taken together, this work returns a reconstructive method to the emerging field of decolonial philosophy.
Davis has lectured on his books in South Africa, Brazil, and Germany, as well as across the UK and North America.
His pragmatic orientation has led him to work on teams that bring theory and practice together. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition and as Director of Partnerships for the UNESCO Chair on Health, Race, and Human Rights.
Davis often engages public audiences. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he co-wrote a widely shared essay on the role of philosophy during health emergencies, Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis. Later he hosted David Scott for a conversation about thinking our present conjuncture called Stuart Hall’s Ethics.
In 2023, the online magazine Public Books asked him to write about solidarity, leading to his best-known essay, How to Embrace a Wildfire.
Davis is currently writing a book about desire.
His Academia page gives an overview of his publications.
CV: full Curriculum Vitae
Contact: bd2838 [at] columbia.edu