HIGHLIGHTS
- 2025 Recipient of the Harold McGraw, Jr., Prize for Higher Education
- Senior Advisor to the Chancellor (CUNY) on Transformation, 2019-2025
- Winner of the 2021 Annual Advocacy Award from the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences.
- Two-Time Winner of the Frederic W. Ness Book Prize from the American Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the only person to do so since the award’s inception in 1979.
TITLES
On May 8, 2025, Davidson and Alondra Nelson were part of a HASTAC webinar, “AI and the Future of Higher Education” that had more than 800 registrants: https://hastac.hcommons.org/.
That evening, a second panel was held at the Graduate Center featuring Davidson and four other scholars honoring her career. “The Future of Higher Education” is available on YouTube where it has had over 280,000 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J76sb9WOrWo
Photo Credit: Chris Hildreth
Fall 2025: Davidson is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, invited by Dr. Alondra Nelson to be part of her Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. At IAS, Davidson is working on a new book that examines the historical precedents in three past “Information Revolutions” for issues, problems, and questions we need to be asking today, as individuals and as a society, in order to safeguard and regulate today’s Artificial Intelligence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR [For a 300-word bio, please see the attached Media Kit.]
Cathy N. Davidson has spent her career reimagining higher education for a rapidly changing world. A leading voice in digital literacy, learning science, and interdisciplinary innovation, she is known for translating research into action—and for helping institutions evolve to meet the needs of all students. At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she is a Distinguished Professor, she founded the Futures Initiative to promote equity, social mobility, and student-centered learning at every level of the university. Her first act, upon coming to the Graduate Center, was to insist upon the creation of a state-of-the-art Teaching and Learning Center dedicated to the doctoral students who teach some 200,000 CUNY undergraduates each year. She then worked with colleagues to secure over $6 million in grant funding for a special program—the only one of its kind in the US—to help teach doctoral students (who demographically tend to have had affluent public or private K-12 and college educations) new pedagogical methods geared to community college students (who, at CUNY and nationally, are often first-generation college students and first-generation Americans). She also serves as Senior Advisor on Transformation to the CUNY Chancellor, focusing on student success and inclusive, career-connected learning across all CUNY’s 25 two-year, four-year, and professional schools.
Davidson’s impact spans decades and disciplines. At Duke University, she was the institution’s first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, helping faculty to launch more than 60 cross-departmental programs and introducing the pioneering iPod First-Year Experience—an early model for integrating technology into undergraduate education. In 2001, she co-founded HASTAC.org (“Haystack”: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, what NSF has called “the world’s first academic social network”) and has served as HASTAC’s director or codirector since its inception. Every year, HASTAC accepts a new cohort of 50-75 new international students in its HASTAC Scholars program that is run entirely by doctoral students interested in developing high-level collaborative, administrative, and management skills.
Davidson has published some 20 books, including, most recently, the award-winning books that are part of her “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press, 2011; paper 2012); The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books, 2017; paper 2018); and, coauthored with Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022; paper 2024). The latter two each won the annual Frederick W. Ness Book Award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Davidson is the only person to have won the Ness Award twice in its 46-year history. In Fall 2026, she and coauthor Jody Greene will publish “Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times” (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
Davidson has received numerous other honors and awards, including the World Technology Network’s Educator of the Year Award. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council for the Humanities and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize Committee’s Future of Learning Conference. In 2025, she was named the winner of the McGraw Prize in Higher Education.
AUTHOR BIO [Detailed Version]
Davidson began her career as a playwright, represented by the legendary theatrical agent Helen Merrill, before turning to scholarly academic and trade nonfiction writing. The author or editor of over twenty books, she has taught at a range of institutions, from community college to the Ivy League. She held two distinguished professor chairs at Duke University, where she taught for twenty-five years and also became the university’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies (1998-2006). As Vice Provost, Davidson was responsible for working with faculty and other university leaders on a number of key projects, including: Duke’s first Program in Cognitive Neuroscience; the Canine Cognition Center; the Center for Environmental Solutions; the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine, and Applied Science; the Nasher Museum of Art; and many more. With Dean Karla F. C. Holloway, she cofounded the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and cofounded and co-directed the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She led the creation of the Program in Information Science and Studies and orchestrated the “Duke iPod experiment” of 2004, where students were given then-cutting edge Apple products –first-generation iPods (still one-way music-listening devices)–and challenged to expand their educational use, including by inventing breakthrough interactive interfaces. Working closely with philanthropist Melinda French Gates, Davidson created the University Scholars Program and collaborated on developing the French Family Science Center. In 2001, she cofounded and continues to codirect HASTAC.org (called “Haystack”), the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, recognized by the National Science Foundation as the world’s “first and oldest academic social network.”
Davidson’s many prizewinning books include the classics like Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford University Press, 2004), Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, (Duke University Press, 2006), and Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Norton, 1999, with photographer Bill Bamberger). Most recently, she has concentrated on the science of learning in the “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking/Penguin 2017); The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books, 2017; reissued in paperback, 2022); and, co-authored with Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022). Both The New Education and The New College Classroom were awarded the Frederick W. Ness annual book prize from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
Davidson has won many other awards, prizes, and grants throughout her career including from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, NSF, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. She is the 2016 recipient of the Ernest L. Boyer Award for “significant contributions to higher education.” She received the Educator of the Year Award (2012) from the World Technology Network and, in 2021, the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences presented Davidson with its annual Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award. She has served on the Board of Directors of Mozilla (2012-18), was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities (2011-17), and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning (2019, 2020). In 2025, she was named the winner of the McGraw Prize in Higher Education.
Davidson blogs regularly as Cat in the Stack on hastac.org.
You can follow @CathyNDavidson on Bluesky and @catinstack2 on TikTok and Instagram.
For speaking engagements, Cathy Davidson is represented by Leigh Bureau.
For publishing and book rights, Cathy Davidson is represented by Mullane Literary Associates.
In honor of the publication of The New Education, the author contributes to a scholarship fund established at the Graduate Center, CUNY.