He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Virginia. Prior to returning to graduate school, he was director of a human rights group and program director of a charitable foundation.

Professor Davis's research centers on questions of self and morality, psychiatric classification and medicalization, narrative and bioethics. He is the author of Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and editor of Identity and Social Change (Transaction, 2000) and Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (SUNY Press, 2002). His articles on issues of identity, victimization, technology, memory, and narrative have appeared in Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, Society, The Hedgehog Review, and others.

Currently, he is at work on articles dealing with representations of victims, secularization, suffering, and public perspectives on ADHD/Ritalin and the limits of medicalization. His larger projects include a study of public perception of psychopharmacology and the ideal self, and a book project tentatively titled, Your Confident Self is Waiting: Shyness, Medicalization, and the New Pharmacology.