Philip Davis, born 1953, is the Director of Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems at the University of Liverpool where is also Professor of English Literature. His most recent publications include Shakespeare Thinking (Shakespeare Now!), Bernard Malamud; A Writer’s Life, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters and The Victorians 1830-1880, vol 8.

Philip is also general editor of a new series, The Literary Agenda, from Oxford University Press, on the future of literary studies in the twenty-first century: his own volume in the series, On Reading and the Reader is published in October 2013. He works in close collaboration with The Reader Organization (directed by Dr Jane Davis) in bringing literature to a wide variety of groups and persons outside the University and is editor of The Reader magazine which has just celebrated its fiftieth issue.

He is literary executor for the estate of the Nottingham novelist and Booker Prize winner, Stanley Middleton.