Blair Davis received his PhD from the Department of Communication Studies at McGill University in 2007, and received his MA in communication and BA in English from Simon Fraser University.
His specific teaching and research interests include: Comics Studies; B-movies; Comic Book Movies; Classical Hollywood cinema; representations of race, class, gender and sexuality in comics and cinema; economic contexts of cinema; the intersections of film and television with other media industries; film genre studies (especially horror/science-fiction); media ecology. In 2017, he was awarded DePaul University's Spirit of Inquiry award for excellence in research.
Davis is the author of The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Comic Book Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators and Culture in the Golden Age (University of Texas Press, 2022). His work appears in such journals as Cinema Journal, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, as well as in such anthologies as Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited (Wayne State University Press, 2021), Keywords for Comics Studies (New York University Press, 2021), The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) Comics and Pop Culture (University of Texas Press, 2020), Working Class Comic Book Heroes (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear After 1945 (Scarecrow, 2007), Reel Food: Essays on Film and Food (Routledge, 2004), and Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
He has written articles for The Washington Post, USA Today, Ms. Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, and appeared on two episodes of James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction (AMC, 2018). Davis has been interviewed by such media outlets as Annenberg Media, The Chicago Tribune, ABC-7, CBC Radio, PRI, Reel Chicago, USA Today, Voice of America, WBEZ and the Wall Street Journal.
Selected Publications
Books
Book Chapters
- “Silver Tiaras, Removable Afros and the Visual Design of Black Comic Book Superheroes,”
The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Blackness in Comics and Sequential Art. Eds. John Jennings & Francis Gateward, (Rutgers University Press, 2015.)
- “Of Apes and Men (And Monsters and Girls): The Ape Film and 1940s Horror Cinema,”
Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade, Eds. Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Charlie EllBé and Kristopher Woofter, (Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 275-294.)
Journal Articles
Media