Dawn Rae Davis is an interdisciplinary women’s studies scholar and epistemologist with a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota.  Her research areas are in feminist theory, studies of love, postcolonial theory, feminist philosophy, transnational feminisms, feminist critical race theory, and whiteness studies.  She also does work on women’s studies as an interdisciplinary formation of knowledge production.  Her scholarship emphasizes historical diversities of feminisms and the political economies of feminist and other transnational discourses. 

Dawn Rae’s most recent research focused on philosophical and historical relationships between love and knowledge as they are related to modern and postmodern public spheres of power.  Titled, “Decolonizing Love:  Feminist Subjects and the Ability of Not Knowing,” this project was funded in part by an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship.  Dawn Rae is currently working on a collection of autobiographical-theoretical essays that examine how epistemologies related to family, class, race, work, and nation contribute to gendered experiences and perceptions of whiteness.  When completed, these essays will comprise a short monograph titled Learning Whiteness:  The Personal Politics of Protection, Romance, and Reproduction. 

Her publications include “(Love Is) the Ability of Not Knowing:  Feminist Experience of the Impossible in Ethical Singularity” (Hypatia) and “A New Wave, Shifting Ground:  Women’s Studies Ph.D.’s and the Feminist Academy from the Perspective of 1998” in Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations:  Life Stories of Three Generations in the Feminist Academy, 1968-1998 (University of Minnesota Press).

Courses
Point/Counterpoint:  Contemporary Feminist Debates
The Politics of Love:  Philosophical, Historical and Feminist Perspectives
Postcolonial Feminist Theory
The Politics of the Body
Feminism and Philosophy
Feminist Theory
Feminist Film Studies
Gender, Race, and Class in the U.S.
Foundations of Feminist Inquiry
Free Love:  Social Histories of Sex Radicalism

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