Research Expertise and Interest

ancient art, Modern Art, art theory

Research Description

Whitney Davis is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art. He has taught at UC Berkeley since 2001. He is also Honorary Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK, where he leads the annual York Summer Theory Institute in Art History (YSTI). Previously he taught at Northwestern University, where he was John Evans Professor of Art History, Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and a member of the Program in African Studies. Focusing on ancient African, ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern, Mediterranean Bronze Age, and Greco-Roman classical art and archaeology, he received his PhD in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1985, where he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows from 1983 to 1986. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard College, where he focused on evolutionary human biology, prehistoric archaeology, and the history of philosophy. Prior to college he was educated in Canada and the UK. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.

Davis’s teaching and research interests include prehistoric and archaic arts (especially prehistoric arts of north Africa and European Paleolithic art); worldwide rock art; the Classical tradition and neoclassicism in Western art since the later Middle Ages, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain; the development of professional art history in interaction with archaeology, philosophical aesthetics, anthropology, and other disciplines; art theory in visual-cultural studies, especially problems of pictorial representation in relation to computation and notation; aspects of modern art history, especially its expression (or not) of non-normative sexualities; the history and theory of sexuality; queer theory; world art studies; and environmental, evolutionary, and cognitive approaches to the global history of visual culture.