Rate My Professor William Davis

William Davis is Professor and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature at Colorado College, positions he has held within the institution since joining in 1993 as a visiting professor in Humanities, followed by appointments in the Comparative Literature Program and German Studies. He earned a B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1981 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989. Davis teaches across all levels of German language instruction, including intermediate German, German composition and conversation, and German literature from 1918 to 1945. His courses also encompass Introduction to Comparative Literature, the Comparative Literature Senior Seminar, and literary theory. He has taught in Lüneburg, Germany, and contributes to programs in English, German, and comparative literature.

Davis's research focuses on European Romanticism, comparative Romanticism, literary theory, and the connections between philosophy and literature, with recent emphasis on Romantic Hellenism. He has published in English and German in journals including The Germanic Review, European Romantic Review, Prism(s): Integrating the Arts and Sciences in Romanticism, The Goethe Yearbook, Work Picture, and Berliner Schelling Studien. His monograph, Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018 and features chapters on Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Friedrich Schelling, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, examining how Romantic valorization of Greece intertwined with natural philosophy to counter subjectivism and dualism circa 1800. Davis organized meetings of the International Conference on Romanticism in 2005 and 2013, as well as the colloquium 'Romanticism in the Mediterranean World' in Athens, Greece, in June 2017. His current project explores the rhetoric of Philhellenism, material culture, and linkages among Hellenism, literature, and art history. In 2019, the Colorado College Board of Trustees promoted him to full professor.