He received his Master of Arts in International Studies, China Studies (2002) from the Jackson School of International Studies, and Ph.D. (2008) in History from the University of Washington. Prof. Davis has completed his book manuscript on the China-Vietnam borderlands during the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on borderlands powerbrokers and trans-regional groups – this publication is scheduled for release in January 2017 from University of Washington Press, entitled Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands. A second manuscript project concerns productions of ethnographic knowledge in Qing China and Nguyen Vietnam, specifically the role of ethnography as an imperial repertoire and Vietnamese notions of Empire before French colonialism.