Dr. Charles L. Davis II

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

• Associate Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, University of Texas at Austin (2022, present)
• Visiting Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Architecture (Fall 2021) 
• Visiting Assistant Professor, Princeton University School of Architecture (Spring 2021)
• Associate Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, University at Buffalo, SUNY (2017-2022)
• Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Theory, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2011-2016)
• Visiting Assistant Professor, Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University (2010)
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2009)
• Lecturer, Parsons the New School for Design (2008)
• Lecturer, Penn Design, University of Pennsylvania (2007)

BIO

Charles L. Davis II is associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the PhD program in Architecture. He received a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His academic research excavates the role of racial identity and race thinking in architectural history and contemporary design culture. His first book, Building Character: the Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), won the Charles Rufus Morey book prize from the College Arts Association. He is also co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

PH.D. DISSERTATION

Tracing the Integrations of Race and Style Theory in Nineteenth-Century Architectural Style Debates: E. E. Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, 1834-1890

RECENT ARTICLES

• “Colonialism as Style: On the Beaux-Arts Tradition,” in The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory, edited by Elie G. Haddad (New York: Routledge, 2023), 203-215
• “The Social Life of Abstraction,” in Smokehouse Associates, edited by Eric Booker (Published by The Studio Museum in Harlem, Distributed by Yale University Press, 2022), 57-68
• “In the Museum, Outside the Discourse,” review of “Reconstructions” exhibit at MoMA, Log, vol.52 (Summer 2021), 27-37
• “Moving Beyond Repair: Constructing a Revisionist History of Architectural Modernity at MoMA,” Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, edited by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021), 44-49