Davidson served as the first curator of the Mandeville Department of Special Collections (UCSD) where the George Oppen papers are stored.
Davidson, who recently became Deaf, has written extensively on disability issues, most recently "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2 (2003), and "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," in Beyond the Boundary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context.
[2] Another recent critical work, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press.
This latter book gathered his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak.
[3] In addition to being a widely published poet and poetry editor (he is represented in the 2004 edition of Best American Poetry by a poem entitled "Bad Modernism"), Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for the meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New Collected Poems.