Nina Davis earned her Ph.D. in Spanish at the Johns Hopkins University. Her area of specialization is early modern Spanish literature and culture. Her research interests center on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ethnographic and travel writing, early modern peninsular historiography, and Cervantes. She has also published on the picaresque, the novelas, and Zayas. She is author of a book on the function of autobiography in Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and articles and book chapters, including “Ways of Remembering: Cervantes and the Historians, Don Quijote, Part I,” “Re-framing Discourse: Women Before Their Public in María de Zayas,” “Marriage and Investment in El celoso extremeño,” “Breaking the Barriers: The Birth of López de Ubeda's Pícara Justina,” and “Indigestion and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache.” She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Recollection and Community in “Don Quijote.”

She is the Director of the Washington University program at Carlos III University in Madrid and Director of the Madrid Summer Language Institute. She has recently served terms on the MLA Division for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry and Prose Executive Committee and on the Cervantes Society of America Executive Council.