Professor of English Cynthia Davis has won this year’s prestigious USC Educational Foundation Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor of English Cynthia Davis has won this year’s prestigious USC Educational Foundation Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences. Professor Davis is a leading scholar in her field of medical humanities, exploring the intersection between medicine and literature in American literary realism. She is also a leading figure in literary biography. Her several acclaimed books include a biography of the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, famous for her story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Provost Mary Anne Fitzpatrick praises Davis for the “tremendous impact” of her research and commitment to the university. Susan Courtney, Chair of the English Department, writes,
“Dr. Cynthia Davis’s exceptional body of scholarship in the fields of nineteenth-century US literature, women’s writing, and medical humanities has been influential to each of these fields, and at their intersection, both nationally and internationally.”
As a literary critic and literary historian with an abiding interest in the medical humanities, Professor Davis focuses on the postbellum period in the United States and particularly on literary representations of pain, suffering, emotion, embodiment, and the inner life. She has published numerous edited collections, peer-reviewed articles, essays, and reviews on these topics, as well as two monographs with Stanford University Press and a third (her most recent) with Oxford University Press.
Her latest monograph, Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism (Oxford University Press, 2021, 234pp.) examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for U.S. literary realism, which defined our elite literary culture from the late-1870s through at least the Great War. Improvements in anesthetics and analgesics, combined with the rise of influential religious sects like Christian Science, helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Rather than embracing either this revulsion from pain or the immersion in it promoted by contemporary proponents of the “strenuous life,” the realist writers studied by Professor Davis advanced an alternative definition of a highly civilized sensibility, one indebted to an uncommon and sophisticated responsiveness to suffering.
Her current book project reflects her equal commitment to literary biography. Her scholarship on the author Edith Wharton, author of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, led to her being invited to serve as the solo editor of a volume of Edith Wharton’s Life Writings, collected together for the first time in this edited volume for Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Edith Wharton.
Professor Davis comments, “I appreciate Susan Courtney’s nominating me for this award. It feels good to be recognized for my 30+-year-career as a scholar and researcher at this university.” The USC Educational Foundation Research Award was established in 1984. Each award consists of a $3,000 prize and a certificate of recognition, one that Professor Davis has richly earned.