Dom Davies
Dr Dom Davies is the Programme Director for City's BA English undergraduate degree. He teaches across the BA and on the department's MA English. He is committed to teaching English Literature in a way that is politically informed, socially inclusive, and critically generative.
Dom's research focuses on the broad themes of colonial, postcolonial, and world literature; the cultural politics of nation, race, capitalism, and the climate; and the imagination and representation of infrastructure. He has published in the field of urban cultural studies and written about visual responses to migration and refugees, especially in comics and graphic narratives. His is interested in different ways of looking at images of conflict and war, in inclusive models of humanism and leftwing thought, and the development of infrastructure in the age of climate breakdown. He welcomes applications from prospective PhD students interested in working on any of these or similar themes.
Dom is currently writing a polemic and accessible history of infrastructure in Britain that puts the "levelling up" agenda in cultural and political context. This book is provisionally titled The Broken Promise of Infrastructure in Britain. It will be published by Lawrence & Wishart in 2023.
Dom is the author of more than forty peer reviewed articles and book chapters. His first book, Imperial Infrastructure & Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930, was published by Peter Lang in 2017. His second book, Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives, was published by Routledge in 2019. Dom is also the co-editor with Professor Elleke Boehmer, of Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and with Drs Erica Lombard and Ben Mountford, of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World (Peter Lang, 2017). Most recently, he is the co-editor with Professor Candida Rifkind of a collection of essays and artworks, Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). He is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Rifkind entitled Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (forthcoming with Wilfred Laurier UP in 2023).
Dom holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He has facilitated and convened a number of international research projects, networks and conferences. He is always happy to hear from people with similar research interests, prospective PhD students, and those interested in collaborating on future projects.
Dom's research focuses on the broad themes of colonial, postcolonial, and world literature; the cultural politics of nation, race, capitalism, and the climate; and the imagination and representation of infrastructure. He has published in the field of urban cultural studies and written about visual responses to migration and refugees, especially in comics and graphic narratives. His is interested in different ways of looking at images of conflict and war, in inclusive models of humanism and leftwing thought, and the development of infrastructure in the age of climate breakdown. He welcomes applications from prospective PhD students interested in working on any of these or similar themes.
Dom is currently writing a polemic and accessible history of infrastructure in Britain that puts the "levelling up" agenda in cultural and political context. This book is provisionally titled The Broken Promise of Infrastructure in Britain. It will be published by Lawrence & Wishart in 2023.
Dom is the author of more than forty peer reviewed articles and book chapters. His first book, Imperial Infrastructure & Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930, was published by Peter Lang in 2017. His second book, Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives, was published by Routledge in 2019. Dom is also the co-editor with Professor Elleke Boehmer, of Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and with Drs Erica Lombard and Ben Mountford, of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World (Peter Lang, 2017). Most recently, he is the co-editor with Professor Candida Rifkind of a collection of essays and artworks, Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). He is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Rifkind entitled Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (forthcoming with Wilfred Laurier UP in 2023).
Dom holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He has facilitated and convened a number of international research projects, networks and conferences. He is always happy to hear from people with similar research interests, prospective PhD students, and those interested in collaborating on future projects.
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Papers by Dom Davies
three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well.
three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well.
By developing a methodology called "infrastructural reading", the author shows how a focus on the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance that manifests spatially within their literary, narrative and formal elements. This subversive reading strategy – which is applied in turn to writers as varied as H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner and John Buchan in South Africa, and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster and Edward Thompson in India – demonstrates that these mostly pro-imperial writings can reveal an array of ideological anxieties, limitations and silences as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation.
Beginning its story in the West Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent, this introduction uses the phrase ‘infrastructures of feeling’ to show how certain stories, affects, and experiences – what Raymond Williams referred to as structures of feeling – are connected to the hard materials that we encounter and rely on in our everyday lives, from railways and roads to sewers and housing.
By developing a methodology called «infrastructural reading», the author shows how a focus on the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance that manifests spatially within their literary, narrative and formal elements. This subversive reading strategy – which is applied in turn to writers as varied as H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner and John Buchan in South Africa, and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster and Edward Thompson in India – demonstrates that these mostly pro-imperial writings can reveal an array of ideological anxieties, limitations and silences as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation.
the multiple layers of discrimination and social exclusion embedded
within the physical layout of the city. They then deploy the form to
unpack, challenge and overhaul those same infrastructural coordinates,
rerouting subversive and often counter-cultural pathways through Cairo’s
discriminatory urban space. Finally, on occasion these comics even
participate in a reconstruction process, building stories that weave the
city’s constituent parts back into a new, notably ‘public’ urban fabric.
Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of
social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives,
on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.
From: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030379971
By developing a methodology called «infrastructural reading», the author shows how a focus on the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance that manifests spatially within their literary, narrative and formal elements. This subversive reading strategy – which is applied in turn to writers as varied as H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner and John Buchan in South Africa, and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster and Edward Thompson in India – demonstrates that these mostly pro-imperial writings can reveal an array of ideological anxieties, limitations and silences as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation.
Included here is the introduction from Imperial Infrastructure.