Ben Davies is Professor of Literature in the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark.
He obtained his MA and PhD from the University of St Andrews and his MSt from the University of Oxford. In 2024-2025, he held a Research Fellowship at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and in 2024, a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. From 2020-2022, he was the Co-I for the Carlsberg Foundation ‘Lockdown Reading Project’, which led to the co-authored monograph Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022; winner of the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize).
Ben’s research focuses on modern and contemporary literature and theory, with particular emphasis on time, narrative theory, reading, method and critical practice. He works at the intersections of literature, theory, and the sociology of reading. He was the PI on a research project funded by the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) that examines the relationship between the value of reading and time use in the twenty-first-century university. The rationale for this research is to see when, how, and why academics and students read. The main output of this project will be a book provisionally titled Reading At University. His article 'Critical Reading and the Fantasy of Method' is in press with PMLA.
Ben currently serves as Chair of University English, one of the main bodies that promotes the study of English in universities in the UK. He is also a member of the Institute of English Studies Advisory Council, and an Advisory Board Member of the journal C21. In 2025, he was appointed a member of the English sub-panel for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF).
For more information about Professor Ben Davies, please refer to the SDU Research Portal.
