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The History of Art Department's Faculty Member - Whitney Davis



Whitney Davis
George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Art History
Ancient, Modern & Theory

email: wmdavis@berkeley.edu
address: 415 Doe Library
Berkeley, Ca 94720
phone: 510-643-4710
more info.: download Davis's CV (as a pdf)
Whiteny Davis
Bio

Whitney Davis has been Professor of History & Theory of Ancient & Modern Art at UC Berkeley since 2001. Previously he taught at Northwestern University, where he was John Evans Professor of Art History and Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities. He received his PhD in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1985, where he was also a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows from 1983 to 1986.

Davis's research interests include Paleolithic, prehistoric, and archaic arts (especially prehistoric and predynastic arts of northeastern Africa); rock art; the Classical tradition and neoclassicism in Western art since the later Middle Ages, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France, Germany, and Britain; the development of professional art history and its distinctive models, methods, and rhetorics, in interaction with archaeology, philosophical aesthetics, comparative anthropology, and other disciplines; art theory in visual-cultural studies, especially problems of pictorial representation in relation to computation and notation; aspects of modern and contemporary art history, especially its expression (or not) of nonnormative sexualities; the history and theory of sexuality, especially homosexualist traditions in psychology, sexology, and anthropology and the early history of Freudian psychoanalysis; world art studies; and evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the global history of visual culture.

He is the author of The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge, 1989), Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (1992), Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch (Harvard, 1996); Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" Case (Indiana, 1996); Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (1996); Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia, 2010); and A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, 2010). Currently he is working on Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Ancient Egypt to New Media (a companion volume to A General Theory of Visual Culture) and Archaeologies of the Standpoint (based on his Research Forum Lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006). Recent articles and talks have dealt with eighteenth-century British portraiture, neuroaesthetics and "radical pictoriality," the photography of Massimo Vitali, sexual-selection theory in Victorian aesthetics, and the historiography of frontality in prehistoric and ancient arts. He has published over 60 articles in journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings.

At UC Berkeley, Davis regularly teaches History of Art 100, a course in "methods and theories of art history" required of undergraduate majors in History of Art, and History of Art 200, a proseminar in the same materials required of first-year PhD students in History of Art. Other recent courses include lecture courses on Queer Visual Culture (in the minor program in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies) and Ancient Art & the Modern Imagination, undergraduate seminars on Art History in the 21st Century and on Darwin and the Arts, and graduate seminars on Notations, World Art Studies, and the 2010 Judith Stronach Memorial Travel Seminar on Universal Museums in a Global Context: The Case of the British Museum.

Davis has been awarded fellowships by the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Humanities Center, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has served as member of the board of the College Art Association and recently as a member of the Advisory Board of CASVA. At Berkeley, he has served as Chair of the Department of History of Art, Director of the Film Studies Program, Director of the LGBT Minor Program, Chair of the University Senate Committee on the Library and Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Consortium for the Arts and the Arts Research Center. He was a founding member of what is now the Berkeley Center for New Media. In 2008 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Division of Arts & Humanities.

Recent PhDs have finished dissertations on relief sculpture and the "rise of optical aesthetics" in late medieval Italian art, the manuscript diagrams of the visionary Opicinus of Canistris (1294-c. 1354), the imaging of the "biogenetic law" (law of recapitulation) from Darwin to Deleuze and Laplanche, the problem of "digital aesthetics" as a model for reexamining the history of modern and contemporary art, Wittgensteinian approaches to musical apperception, the "materialism" identified with the art of Henri Matisse and the philosophy of George Santayana, and Jackson Pollock's engagement with American philosophical pragmatism, transactionism, and interactionism. He has served on PhD committees in History of Art, Architecture, English, Film Studies, History, Music, and Rhetoric.


Recent Activities

In 2011-12, Whitney Davis has been on sabbatical leave in London (Fall semester) and serving as a visiting professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in the framework of the Berkeley/LMU Humanities Exchange (Spring semester). He will be holding short-term faculty appointments at the University of York in June, 2011 and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in July, 2011. His two new books have been receiving considerable attention, though it remains unclear whether this will translate into many sales! His Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2010) was reviewed in the lead/cover feature in the March 18 edition of the Times Literary Supplement. A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2011) will be the subject of a roundtable at LMU in May 2011. At LMU, Whitney is delivering a series of lectures on “New Materialisms And Art History”: “Why Visual Studies Needs Art History,” Neurovisuality: Why Vision Science Needs Art History,” and “Radical Pictoriality: Why Aspect Psychology Needs Art History.” These will be published in preliminary form as a short monograph of the Center for Advanced Study at LMU. He has also prepared the final essay, “The Future of Art History,” for the second edition of the Lexikon der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Ulrich Pfisterer at LMU, and is contributing essays on Heidegger’s re-use of Hegel’s metaphor of the “ladder” of phenomenology to a forthcoming anthology of studies of Heidegger and art history and on the paleoanthropology of depiction to a forthcoming special issue of RES, “Wet/Dry: Source and Trace,” edited by Christopher S. Wood and Francesco Pellizzi. A review of Margaret Iversen and Stephen W. Melville’s Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures will appear in CAA Reviews in summer, 2011.

Whitney’s major project while on leave is the completion of a companion volume to A General Theory of Visual Culture. Tentatively titled, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Ancient Egypt to New Media, it re-investigates the history of “conceptual” (or non-naturalistic) pictorial arts in ancient Egypt, naturalistic or mimetic arts in the Greco-Roman world and in the Italian Renaissance, and “digital” or algorithmically numericized pictorial arts in contemporary “new media” in light of essential distinctions between image and picture and between what Whitney calls AC-pictoriality (virtual pictorial spaces apparently continuous with the beholder’s visual space) and DCpictoriality (virtual pictorial spaces visibly discontinuous with the beholder’s visual space), whether the depicted objects in the virtual pictorial spaces are “naturalistic” (mimetic of objects recognizable in the extra-pictorial world) or not. In addition, in February, 2011, Whitney’s essay “Massimo Vitali’s Mammals” formed the text for Natural Habitats: Massimo Vitali Photography 2000 - 2008 (published by Steidl in Germany), a selection of 120 large photographs from the work of the influential Italian documentarian. After selling his house in the Berkeley hills in 2008, Whitney has been dividing his time between an apartment in San Francisco, activities with his “gay family” in Chicago, and a flat in Chapel Market, London, which consumes pretty much all his spare time.