Wade Davis, an anthropologist and former explorer in residence with the National Geographic Society, has made his career traveling the world while collecting botanical samples and studying endangered cultures. In July, he will set off on a different path as a first-time professor at the University of British Columbia, in his native Vancouver.
A lecturer and author of such best-selling books as The Serpent and the Rainbow, Mr. Davis, who is 60, will become an anthropology professor in the university’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, a research and policy center, specializing in cultures and ecosystems at risk. He will also hold a research post within the university’s Museum of Anthropology.
Mr. Davis, who spent 20 years based in Washington, D.C., says the post has given him the chance to return home at a time when the province is facing challenges related both to native peoples’ self-government and to the environment. British Columbia has numerous treaty negotiations with native peoples under way, and it has been at the center of public debates about a proposed oil pipeline set
to run under indigenous-held
land.
“For an anthropologist, or even a historian, this is such a place that is struggling with all these issues in real time,” he says. “So it just feels wonderful to be back in a land where the voices of native people are so very strong and very much a part of the provincial and national dialogue.”
The post will also allow him to guide students, as his professors once guided him. “I know how powerful that can be in the life of a young student,” he says. “It’s definitely my time, in whatever modest way I can, to be available to mentor young people.” He’s received hundreds of letters over the years from students seeking advice or wanting to be a part of his research, he says. “I answer every one.”
Mr. Davis will teach two courses each year: a graduate seminar and an undergraduate introduction to cultural anthropology. To make anthropology more accessible to students and the public, he will emphasize public speaking and literary writing in his classroom instead of more-traditional academic papers, he says.
“The lessons of anthropology are so important that you must be able to communicate them in ways that are accessible, without ever dumbing them down,” he says.
Mr. Davis will spend one semester each year teaching and the rest of the year continuing his research, writing, and speaking projects. He has no plans to slow down.
Gage Averill, dean of the faculty of arts, recruited Mr. Davis for his research reputation—he has a Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University—and for his “generalist credibility,” Mr. Averill says. Mr. Davis has written more than a dozen books; Into the Silence, a book on a Mount Everest explorer, won the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. His work on Haitian “zombies” inspired a 1980s horror film.
The university is pushing for more policy-relevant research and more engagement with local communities, Mr. Averill says, and he expects Mr. Davis’s wide fieldwork and public persona to fit those goals. The director of the Museum of Anthropology, Anthony A. Shelton, says Mr. Davis will help meet the museum’s commitment to public outreach as well.
Mr. Averill expects the new professor will keep students engaged with his stories of fieldwork around the globe.
And if the urge to explore full time returns? “We’ll steal his passport.”