Davis Mendez is a formerly incarcerated scholar  and organizer hailing from California’s central coast. While at Monterey Peninsula College, he founded a student club for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted peoples in association with the Berkeley Underground Scholars to assist their mission of building a prison-to-school pipeline. While at community college, he received recognition from the California Senate for his work there.

He transferred to UC Berkeley, during the COVID pandemic shutdowns, and received a BA in English with High Distinction. He continued his work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples as the inaugural fellow of the Prisoners Literature Project. For his senior thesis “'Molotov the Spaceship:' Left Behind by the Incoherencies of Latinidad," he was awarded the English department’s Phelan Scholarship. 

He worked in the education department at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. While there, he created an intersectional community engagement program called Critical Conversations Cafe (c3). With the aquarium’s mission to inspire conservation of the ocean in coastal communities of color, Davis brought in scholars, community organizers, and organizations with seemingly incompatible missions to bridge the divide between the siloed ocean conservation sphere with abolitionists, immigration activists, and community farmers. While there, he served as guest editor for the special issue Navigating the Progress of Equity in Aquariums in the Journal of Museum Education. 

He is currently (2025) in his second year at Princeton. His research interests include regimes of racial domination, classification systems and struggles, carceral studies, habitus, embodiment, Black and Indigenous encounters in the antebellum, civil war, and the Reconstruction Era, the oceanic and soil imaginary, counterinsurgency, and postcolonial studies.