Mike Davis

Mike Davis is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and activist. He is best known for his research on social classes in his hometown of Southern California. Born in 1946 in Fontana, California, he grew up in El Cajon. Davis worked as a meat cutter, truck driver, and was active in the Student Movement for a Democratic Society (SDS). He studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not truly begin his academic career until the early 1970s when he earned his BA and MA degrees. He never completed his Ph.D. in history, which he had started at the University of California. In 1998, he received the MacArthur Fellowship Award and was a fellow at the Getty Institute. In 2007, he won the Lannan Literary Award in the category of non-fiction books. He is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-editor of the "New Left Review." He also writes for the British monthly "Socialist Review," the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain, the American magazine "The Nation," and the British magazine "New Statesman." He identifies as an "international socialist" and "Marxist environmentalist."