Jack E. Davis is a distinguished professor of history and the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2017). His latest book, The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2022), was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, described as a “rollicking, poetic, wise new book,” and a LA Times top-five nonfiction book for 2022. Before joining the UF faculty, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Eckerd College, and in 2002 he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman. Upon arriving at UF in 2003, he founded the department’s student journal, Alpata: A Journal of History. His Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize for the best book in southern history published in 2001. His next book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009), received a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. In 2011 and 2014, he was a fellow respectively at Escape to Create and the MacDowell Colony, where he worked on The Gulf. The New York Times Book Review called The Gulf a “beautiful homage to a neglected sea.” The Gulf was a New York Times Notable Book for 2017 and made several other “best of” lists for the year, including those of the Washington Post, NPR, Forbes, and the Tampa Bay Times. In addition to winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History, The Gulf received the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction. In April 2019, Davis was the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Corporation fellowship, which helped support the writing of The Bald Eagle. He is currently working on a book employing the working title, “The American Coast: History and Prophecy at Land’s End.” In 2024, he was named author of the year by the Florida House on Capitol Hill.