Originally from Butler, Georgia, David A. Davis attended Emory University (B.A. 1997) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D. 2006). He taught at Wake Forest University before coming to Mercer in 2008.

He studies southern literature and culture, and he teaches courses in American literature and southern studies. He has published essays and review essays in African American Review, American Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Southern Quarterly, Southern Literary Journal, and other journals. He edited a reprint of Victor Daly's novel Not Only War: A Story of Two Great Conflicts (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010) and a reprint of John L. Spivak's novel Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang: Originally Published as Georgia Nigger (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2012). Currently, he is co-editing a collection of essays on southern foodways and literature and a collection of essays on regionalism and technology, and he is writing a book on World War I and southern modernism. He is chair of the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature committee, he edits the Society for the Study of Southern Literature newsletter, and he maintains the William Faulkner Society website.