Davidson has written eight books of poetry as well as numerous historical, cultural and critical works. He has been affiliated with the University of California at San Diego since 1974 and as a professor of American literature since 1988 with areas of study and research in Modern Poetry, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Disability Studies. Davidson served as the first curator of the Mandeville Department of Special Collections where the George Oppen papers are stored. The Archive for New Poetry is now a major campus, community and international resource for studying post-1945 English-language poetry, and is one of the four largest American poetry collections in the U.S. The archive contains holdings that emphasize the ongoing “countertradition” in recent American writing – particularly the Objectivist poets, the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the Language School. Davidson, who recently became Deaf, has written extensively on disability issues, most recently "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2, and "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," in Beyond the Boundary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. A collection of essays on disability was published as Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Another recent critical work, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. This latter book gathered his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. In addition to being a widely published poet and poetry editor, Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for the meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New Collected Poems.
"Disability Poetics." The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Articles
"Notes beyond the Notes: Wallace Stevens and Contemporary Poetics," Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
"Dismantling 'Mantis:' Reification and Objectivist Poetics," American Literary History, 3.3 : 521-541.
"Marginality in the Margins: Robert Duncan's Textual Politics," Contemporary Literature, 33.2 : 275-301.
"'When the world strips down and rouges up:' Redressing Whitman," Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
"The Lady from Shanghai: California Orientalism and 'guys like us,'" Western American Literature.
"Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation." Beyond the Boundary: American Identity and Multiculturalism. Ed. Tim Powell. New Brunswick: Rutgers U Press, 1999. 39-60.
"Hearing Things: The Scandal of Voice in Deaf Performance," Enabling the Humanities: A Disability Studies Sourcebook, eds. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001.
