Michael Ryan Davis

About Mike's Work

Mike Davis is an historian whose writings span a range of urban, political, environmental, and social issues.

Davis merges academic scholarship and journalistic critical commentary into writing that is inspiring, informative, and provocative. His book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1992) is an accessible history of Los Angeles that combines academic reportage, ethnography, and investigative journalism. Davis's Prisoners of the American Dream (1986) provides a similarly accessible history of the working class and of labor organizations in the United States in the postwar period. He is also the author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1999), Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City 2000 (2000), Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Families and the Making of the Third World (2002), and Dead Cities and Other Tales (2002). Davis is a frequent contributor to The Nation and The Los Angeles Times.

Biography

Davis is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He served previously as a professor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and as an instructor in architecture at the Southern California Institute of Technology.

Davis received a B.A. (1968), an M.A. (1970), and a C.Phil. (1979) from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Last updated January 1, 2005