Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside

Who Will Build the Ark? The Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastrophic Convergence

A native Southern Californian with a varied background in activism, journalism, and urban studies, Mike Davis is the award-winning author of eighteen books. During the 1990s, Davis taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and published controversial polemics about Los Angeles in crisis, including City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1999).

More recently, Davis’ research has encompassed an impressive range of urgent contemporary issues: the Latinization of large American cities in Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (2001), the history of famine and empire in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Families and the Making of the Third World (2002), the future of poor cities in Planet of Slums (2006), and urban vulnerability in Dead Cities and Other Tales (2003), The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2006), and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007). He is currently working on a book about climate change in the urban Southwest. Mike Davis is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.