Cathy Davidson

Bio

Cathy N. Davidson is an American scholar and university professor. She has served as the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University since 1996 and has held a second distinguished chair as the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies since 2006. She has served in leadership roles at Duke and a variety of organizations and has authored or edited eighteen books. Her work for the last decade has focused on technology, collaboration, cognition, learning, and the digital age.^[1]

Davidson was born in Chicago, received her B.A. from Elmhurst College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Binghamton University. She also has done postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago and was presented with Honorary Doctorates from Elmhurst College andNorthwestern University.^[2]

Her most recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn will be published by Viking Press in Fall 2011. Dr. Davidson also chairs Duke University's Digital Futures Task Force, whose university-wide open access policy was unanimously accepted by Duke's Academic Council last spring.