BIO

Whitney Davis is Professor of History & Theory of Ancient & Modern Art and Director of the Consortium for the Arts and the Arts Research Center. He was educated at Harvard University (AB 1980, PhD 1985, JF 1983-86), where he specialized in prehistoric, Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Classical art and archaeology, in the anthropology and philosophy of art, and in the history and theory of art history. In 1987, he joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he became John Evans Professor of Art History and Director of the Kaplan Center for the Humanities. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2001 and served as Chair of the Department of History of Art in 2002-05; in addition, he has been Director of the Film Studies Program at Berkeley (2004-5) and an active member of the Center for New Media, which he helped to found. At Berkeley he teaches courses in art-historical methodology and theory in relation to philosophy and cultural criticism (including the undergraduate lecture course on the foundations of art history, History of Art 100); archaic and anthropological art; aspects of modern and contemporary art history; and the history and theory of sexuality (including the required course in Queer Visual Culture in the Program in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies). Graduate seminars have included the required first-year Proseminar in History of Art, "Wittgenstein and Cultural Criticism," "Aestheticism and Decadence in Late Nineteenth Century Art and Art Writing," “Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of the Agency of Art,” "David Summers's Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism,” and “Histories of Virtuality.”  He has received fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Getty Research Institute. He is the author of five books and a number of articles on ancient, modern, and contemporary art and art theory. Three forthcoming books are “Aesthetics and Sexuality from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond,” “Forms of Likeness and the General Theory of Visual Culture,” and “Virtuality and Its Discontents: Essays on Art Theory in World Art History.”  He is currently working on books on homoeroticism in painting and sculpture from 1750 to 1920 (based on his Tomas Harris Lectures in Art History at University College London) and on archaeologies of the beholder's standpoint in diverse visual-cultural traditions (based on his public lecture series as Research Forum Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London). Recent PhD students have completed dissertations on the tensions between figuration, eroticism, and abstraction in late Victorian sculpture in Britain; Jackson Pollock's involvement with American pragmatist theories of intention, action, and subjectivity; Andy Warhol’s “new realism”; Pierre Soulages's "black paintings" and twentieth-century French artistic and theoretical responses to prehistoric culture; and materialism and naturalism in late nineteenth-century aesthetics and art.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Recent articles:

"The World Rewound," Thomas Wartenberg and Murray Smith, eds., Film as Philosophy, p. 199-211, (Blackwells, forthcoming); "Schopenhauer's Ontology of Art," Qui Parle; "Decadence and the Organic Metaphor," Representations 89, p. 131-149, (2005); "Lord Ronald Gower and 'the Offending Adam'," David Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880-1920 (Ashgate, 2005); "Visuality and Pictoriality," Res 46 (2004); "Archaism and Modernism in the Reliefs of Hesy-Ra," John Tait, ed., Ancient Egypt's View of Its Past (UCL Press, 2004).


Books:

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (University of California Press, 1992); Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" Case (Indiana University Press, 1994); Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch (Harvard University Press/Harvard University Art Museums, 1996).

Edited: (with W. K. Simpson), Studies in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Sudan (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1982); Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (Haworth Press, 1989).


Research Interests:

Evolutionary history of consciousness; prehistoric art in northern and southern Africa and in southwestern Europe; Egyptian art and archaeology; anthropology of art; the classical tradition in eighteenth and nineteenth century art and art theory (especially Britain and Germany); history of perspective and other "virtualizing" technologies in the visual field (including contemporary new media); the history of archaeology and art history from the Renaissance to the present day; psychoanalysis, sexuality, and queer theory in relation to the visual arts; philosophical aesthetics.

Recent Talks and Projects