Dominic Davies

Dr Dom Davies is Reader in English at City St George's, University of London. His research focuses on infrastructure, how it is lived and imagined, and its representation and remaking in literature and visual culture. He has published on colonial writing during the British Empire, urban culture and artists' collectives in the global South, and visual responses to migration and refugees, especially in comics and graphic narratives. His research explores ways of looking at images of conflict and war, how we respond to failing or broken infrastructure, and literary and cultural forms that help us to "see" infrastructure differently in an age of climate breakdown. You can learn more about Dom's work at www.drdomdavies.com.

Dom's most recent book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, tackles the divisive cultural politics that have been used to deflect attention away from Britain's failing infrastructure, from Brexit through to the "levelling up" agenda and beyond. With case studies that range from Stoke-on-Trent and South Africa to Silicon Valley, the book shows that these broken promises run back through broader histories of industry and empire, challenging dominant ways of thinking about infrastructure and asking how we can reclaim its world-shaping force for ourselves.

Dom's most recent co-authored book, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, written with Candida Rifkind, explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas. It shows how comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism, and move us towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.