Jon Davies
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (September 2025–August 2027)
The Department’s new Postdoctoral Fellow, Jon Davies (2025–27), is sponsored by Professor Jennifer V. Evans.
About Jon Davies
My research examines how artists advance new sexual and social horizons through not only their artwork but also their experimental life and kinship practices. I am very excited to engage with the scholarly community at Carleton, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
In 2023, I graduated from the PhD program in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art) at Stanford University, where I wrote the dissertation “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995” under Prof. Richard Meyer. It examines the close intertwining of artistic production, sexual practices and pedagogy formal and informal in the San Francisco Bay Area from the end of World War II to the height of the AIDS crisis fifty years later. In it, I traced the flowering of queer pedagogy that took place as artists modeled and interrogated the new social formations and sexual possibilities becoming available in the latter half of the 20th century.
My postdoctoral research with Prof. Evans in the Department of History will take my research on San Francisco pedagogy in a new direction. My project, “Free: Irving Rosenthal, Kaliflower and the Ethos of the Underground,” will be an interdisciplinary study of the philosophy and cultural practices of one key San Francisco commune popularly known as Kaliflower, founded in 1967 by the American writer/editor Irving Rosenthal. This initiative epitomizes the wider California counterculture’s goals of total personal and political liberation. I will analyze the intertwined aesthetic-erotic, economic, social, and political ideas that were put into practice through daily life at the Kaliflower commune and disseminated via their eponymous newsletter and queer cultural pursuits within the counterculture and the Bay Area at large. I do this to draw vital lessons for how to live and love more equitably today at a time when many are finding mere survival to be ever more precarious, with queer/trans people particularly vulnerable.
Prior to completing my PhD, I was the Assistant Curator of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008–12), Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries (2012–15), and Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2015–16). My book on Paul Morrissey’s 1970 film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and my edited anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. My scholarship has been published widely, including in GLQ, Public, Master Drawings, RACAR, Afterimage, Porn Studies, Journal of Canadian Art History, Archives of American Art Journal, and in numerous anthologies and catalogues.
Recently, I co-curated the 68th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, “Queer World-Mending,” with artist Steve Reinke (2023), and served as the 2024–25 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada.