Whitney Davis is currently Professor in the Graduate School and George C. and Helen N. Pardee Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History & Theory of Ancient & Modern Art. Since 2013, he has also been Honorary Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK.
For 2024–29, Davis is a Distinguished Scientist & Scholar of the NOMIS Foundation (based in Zürich, Switzerland). Funded by NOMIS, he leads a multiyear and multidisciplinary five-year collaborative research project on the history and theory of “depicturation”: the way in which the visual environment as apprehended by human beings could be shaped perceptually and phenomenologically by their prior familiarities with pictorial representations. The project involves student and faculty art historians dealing with prehistoric, indigenous, ancient, and modern arts in a global scope; historiographers of art history, visual studies, and optical science; anthropologists, archaeologists, and prehistorians of art; evolutionary psychologists and cognitive and experimental psychologists; and philosophers of perception and mind. The project employs two Project Scientists at UC Berkeley; “buys out” teaching time in order for faculty at other institutions to participate in the project; organizes conferences, workshops, and lectures; interviews global experts in the fields relevant to the project; and supports conference attendance, research expenses, and publications by project participants. The project reflects Davis’s critical analysis of the evolutionary, anthropological, and psychological underpinnings of art history’s unspoken theories of “The Visual” as well as his approach to the nature and history of “visual culture” as the measurable and historically specific but not totalized—and indeed often incomplete and unstable—“culturing” of ordinary human visual life in terms of perceived “forms of likeness” of the apprehended aspects of things. And it pursues his long-standing interest in the nature of depiction as a mode of perception in itself, especially in the consequences of depiction for human forms of life.
Davis taught at Berkeley from 2001 until 2023, building on a J. Paul Getty postdoctoral appointment in the humanities at Berkeley in 1987–87 and two visiting faculty appointments in the department in the 1990s. Before coming to Berkeley, he taught at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where he was John Evans Professor of Art History, Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and member of the Program in African Studies. Focusing on ancient north and south African prehistory as well as 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 also 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, art history, and the history of philosophy. Prior to college he was educated in Canada and the UK.
Davis’s research interests include prehistoric and archaic arts; anthropology of 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 geometrical optics, computation, and notation; aspects of modern art history, especially its expression (or not) of non-normative sexualities; the history and theory of sexuality, especially in the psychoanalytic tradition; queer theory; world art studies; and environmental, evolutionary, and cognitive approaches to the global history of visual culture.
He is the author of ten books: The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge UP, 1989); Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (California UP, 1992); Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch (Harvard UP, 1996); Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” Case (Indiana UP, 1996); Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (Penn State UP, 1996); Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia UP, 2010); A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton UP, 2011) (the first volume in his Visual Culture trilogy), which received the Monograph Prize of the American Society for Aesthetics and the Susanne K. Langer Award of the Media Ecology Association; Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective (Princeton UP, 2017) (the second volume); Space, Time, and Depiction (forthcoming) (the third volume); and Visions of Art History (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming), a volume of essays on art historians and art-historical schools of thought. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including serving as one of the core editors of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, published in six volumes by Oxford UP in 2014.
At the moment Davis is working on three new books. Continuing his interest in queer art histories and aesthetics, A Problem in Queer Ethics considers the Victorian artwriter and homosexual emancipationist John Addington Symonds and his complex relations to traditions of British moral philosophy and to Greco-Roman ethical teachings. Continuing his interest in picture theory, Sculptural Representation takes up the much-debated question whether sculptures can be pictures (or depict), considering that they do not ordinarily create “fictive” or “virtual” pictorial spaces (or do they?) and instead operate in the beholder’s “real space” (or maybe not?). The book uses many cross-cultural examples but highlights the mid-twentieth British sculptor Henry Moore based on detailed digital-virtual reconstructions of the visual parameters of his work. In the context of the NOMIS project, Pictures and Populations deals with the worldwide dissemination of pictures by c. 40,000 BCE as one of the cognitive thresholds of “psychologically modern humanity” as well as a key element in humans’ success in gaining genetic control over many other species and in the global cultural diversification of their own species. It examines the role of pictures in shaping humans’ visual life, both as that process might be seen by cultural practitioners (e.g., artists and beholders) in diverse historical contexts and as it might be investigated by art historians and other researchers today. The project is especially interested in computational-digital modeling of logically possible—and indeed cognitively necessary—pictures that do not happen to survive in the archaeological record. It argues that in a sense the most important pictures, historically and/or in social terms, are those absorbed into the biocultural reflexes of ordinary visual perception and do not even need to be made, any longer, as material artifacts/forms.
Davis has published over 125 articles in journals, edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and conference proceedings, including articles in such peer-reviewed journals as African Archaeological Review, South African Archaeological Bulletin, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Texte zur Kunst, October, Representations, Res, Genders, differences, and African Arts.
Recent articles and chapters deal with the representation of climate change in prehistoric art; frontality, scale, and illusion in ancient Egyptian depiction; the effect of artistic modernism on the description of Classical Greek art in the early twentieth century; the nature of “post-formalism” in art history in the early 21st century; Michael Baxandall’s model of the “idiographic stance”; the problematics of “presence” in Paleolithic visual art; On Kawara’s artworks in the early 1960s in response to his visit to the cave of Altamira; Walter Pater’s account of the temporality of the classical ideal in art; Hegel’s theory of Symbolic Art in light of recent anthropology; a re-reading of Panofsky’s “Perspective as Symbolic Form” in light of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit; the obsolescence of the “analog/digital” distinction in recent new-media visual and spatial arts; Franz Boas’s theory of the beholder’s share with respect to the indigenous visual cultures of the North Pacific coast; the use of paintings by Piet Mondrian in neuropsychological research; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the “epistemology of the closet”; Jackson Pollock’s Mural in “the light of photography”; J. G. Herder’s “naturalist” aesthetics; Leo Bersani’s concept of psychic mobility and formal lability in art; “queer art history” in the early twentieth century before “queer art history” of the post-Stonewall era; Ragnar Josephson’s innovative approach to the “birth of artistic creativity”; the covert (and sometimes overt) role of Freudian ego-psychology in modern classicists’ and art critics’ approaches to ancient Greek sculpture; J. A. McN. Whistler’s “folding screen” now in Glasgow (depicting the old Battersea Bridge in London), and its relations to East Asian screens; the problematic location of art history within “the humanities” and the question of art-historical “humanism”; “queering formalism”; and the roles of attentive and non-attentive “looking” in art-historical practice. Recent invited talks include the Rumble Lecture on Classical Art at King’s College London, presentations and discussions at a two-day symposium on his work at the Dahlem Humanities Center of the Free University of Berlin, the FORART lecture in Oslo, and invited lectures, keynotes, and inaugurals for the universities of Vienna, Brno, Essex, Antwerp, Virginia, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Washington, Pennsylvania, British Columbia, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Oxford, Southern California, Toronto, Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, and York, and for University College London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Warburg Institute. His writing has been translated into French, German, Polish, and Chinese and anthologized in textbooks and reference volumes on art history, queer studies, aesthetics, and archaeology.
In addition to his current appointment as a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist, 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 held visiting scholar and visiting professor appointments at Duke University, the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, and the University of York, UK, where he was part-time Visiting Professor of History of Art from 2013 to 2016 and remains Honorary Visiting Professor. He has served as member of the board of the College Art Association and as a member of the Advisory Boards of CASVA and the Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute. He has served or is serving on the editorial boards of Art History, Representations, Open Arts, the Journal of South Asian Studies, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Theory, Culture, and Critique. At Berkeley, he served as Chair of the Department of History of Art (twice), as Director of the Film Studies Program, as Director of the LGBT Minor Program, as Chair of the University Senate Committee on the Library and Scholarly Communication, and as 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.
