Daniel Davies

I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston. My research focuses on how medieval writers theorized life in wartime, concentrating on poetic representations of the experience of war, legal frameworks developed by political theorists, and contemporary accounts by historians and poets. In addition, I study the material and intellectual afterlives of the Middle Ages. I use archival research to recover overlooked medieval texts and research the history of scholarship on the Middle Ages, from the manuscript-collecting practices of sixteenth-century antiquarians to the textbooks scholars use today.

Currently, I am working on my first book, Everyday War: Empire, Nation, and the Making of Medieval Wartime, which examines how war constituted late-medieval literary history and with R.D. Perry of the University of Denver I am co-editing The Hundred Years War and European Literary History for Manchester University Press. My research has been supported by grants from  the Huntington Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Strarthmatine Trust.

My work on medieval literary history, siege warfare, and manuscript studies has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, New Medieval Literatures, and Medium Ævum. My public-facing scholarship has appeared in Avidly, Public Seminar, and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Collation blog.

Originally from Manchester, England, I studied in Edinburgh and Berlin before a Thouron Award brought me to the US for my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.