Founding Director, Faculty Co-Chair, And Chancellor’s Senior Advisor
Cathy N. Davidson is Distinguished Professor of English, Digital Humanities, and Data Analysis and Visualization at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the Futures Initiative as well as Senior Advisor to the CUNY Chancellor on Transformation. She is also the R. F. DeVarney Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University where she served as Duke’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Davidson has published over twenty books including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford UP); Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Norton), with documentary photographer Bill Bamberger; The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (MIT Press), with David Theo Goldberg; and, most recently, the “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking), New Education (Basic Books), and The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press), with Christina Katopodis. Both The New Education and The New College Classroom were recipients of the annual Frederick W. Ness Annual Book Prize awarded by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Davidson is the first author to receive the Ness award more than once since its founding in 1979.
Davidson cofounded and codirects HASTAC (“Haystack”), Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, the world’s first and oldest academic social network (2002-present), with nearly 18,000 members. She served on the Board of Directors of Mozilla (2012-2018) and on the National Council of the Humanities as an appointee of President Barack Obama (2011-2017). She co-directed the Digital Media and Learning Competitions sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2006-2017). She is co-recipient of the 2012 Educator of the Year Award from the World Technology Network and the 2016 recipient of the Ernest J. Boyer Award for Significant Contributions to Higher Education.
Davidson travels extensively in the U.S. and abroad, lecturing and consulting on higher education transformation with students, faculty, chairs, deans, boards of trustees, and ministers of education on the effective ways to make education more equitable and relevant. She is committed to higher education reform in support of a more just society. In 2019 she served as keynote speaker and panelist at the Nobel Prize Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning in Santiago, Chile and will serve on the 2020 Nobel Prize Forum on The Challenges of Learning.
