Mike Davis (scholar)

Mike Davis, 1999 (Photo by Anne Fishbein)

Mike Davis is an American social commentator, urban theorist, and sociographer. He is best known for his investigations of social class structures in his native Southern California.

Born in 1946 in Fontana, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees in History from the University of California, Los Angeles.

City of Quartz and its sequel, The Ecology of Fear are each wildly popular, and both of the books are more open to criticism than similar works because of their thorough and extensive citations, a habit Davis carried over from his academic writing. Many scholars have published critiques of his work challenging his conclusions, which are sometimes fanciful.

Davis currently teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain. He is a member of the Socialist Workers Party of Ireland.

Major works

Planet of Slums (forthcoming, 2006)
The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (2003)
Dead Cities: And Other Tales (2003)
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
Ecology of Fear (2000)
City of Quartz (1990)

External links

Articles on TomDispatch

Articles by Davis

"The Flames of New York", New Left Review, 12, November-December 2001
"Planet of Slums", New Left Review, 26, March-April 2004
"House of Cards", Radical Urban Theory

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