Areas of Expertise
- Semiotics
- Narrative and Visual Narratology
- German children’s literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Education
B.A. Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017
M.A. Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, 2020
Ph.D. Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, 2025
Caleb Davis works in and teaches about visual culture. He is interested in the ways that images contain and elicit narratives through a combination of signs in semiotic systems. In his courses and work, he emphasizes the importance of literacy in visual communication.
His current project, “Reading Double: Focalization, Myth and Master Narrative in German Children's Picturebooks from 1931-1940,” analyzes how children’s picturebooks from the National Socialist era used visual language to communicate ideology to Germany’s youngest readers. Building on research on master narratives and visual semiotics, his project investigates how images that condense core cultural stories, what Roland Barthes calls myths, become narrative resources in the visual stories picturebooks tell. In particular, this research emphasizes the important role played by what narratology terms focalization: the perspective from which the story is presented, or “who sees” the story’s action. It argues that analyzing focalization in picturebooks reveals narrators’ ideology and illuminates how master narratives are communicated.
Caleb’s recent course offerings include “German III,” “Texts and Contexts I,” and “Memory of the Holocaust in Film.”