Creston Davis works at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology, with sustained attention to political theology, critical theory, Girardian accounts of violence and mimesis, and the question of what a genuinely emancipatory institution might look like. He is the founder of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.

He earned his PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Virginia, following graduate work at Duke and Yale and study at Oxford, and before that served in the United States Army with the elite Long Range Surveillance Detachment (Airborne, former LRRP-Ranger). He was Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Rollins College, and resigned that position — liquidating his retirement to fund the venture — to build an alternative to a higher education system he had come to see as structurally dependent on student debt.

GCAS was founded in 2013 with roughly a hundred colleagues, incorporated in Ireland in 2017 as a co-owned college in which researchers and faculty become shareholders, and now offers debt-free BA, MA, and PhD degrees accredited in the European Union to a globally distributed community of researchers.

He has published with MIT Press, Columbia University Press, and Duke University Press, including Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Duke, 2005) and The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (MIT, 2009), the latter a debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek. As a graduate student he founded and co-edited the New Slant series at Duke University Press with Philip Goodchild and Kenneth Surin; he went on to create Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture at Columbia University Press, which he co-edits with Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Jeffrey Robbins.

He has taught and convened seminars with Alain Badiou, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Lewis R. Gordon, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Oliver Stone, and lectures widely across Europe and North America.