Benjamin P. Davis

I am an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.

I am also a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition.

Previously I held fellowships with the Department of African American Studies at Saint Louis University and with the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.

My first book, Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins, reads the mystic Simone Weil as a key political theorist.

My second book, Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics, presents the poet Édouard Glissant as an important voice for the theory and practice of human rights. The Introduction to my Glissant book is freely available here.

My third book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, defends the concepts of “the human” and “humanity” against a critical backdrop in theory today.

Related ideas can be found in my recent essay Edward Said’s Archive: Toward Postcolonial Theory.

I have also been part of several collaborations, including:
- with David Scott, on Stuart Hall’s ethics
- with Kris Sealey, our Introduction to Creolizing Critical Theory
- with Jon Catlin (re Covid), Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis
- with Helen Kinsella, Simone Weil’s Queer Form

My Academia page provides an overview of my work.

For Summer and Fall 2025 guest lectures and speaking engagements, please contact me at benjamin.davis [at] tamu.edu.