Charles L. Davis II

Charles Davis II is associate professor of architectural history and the director of the architecture PhD program at the UT Austin School of Architecture. He is co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), and author of Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (University of Pittsburgh, 2019). His current book project, Putting Black in Place: A Spatial History of Black Architectural Modernity, recovers the overlooked contributions of Black actors in shaping the built environment from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter. He received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and MArch and BPS from the University at Buffalo. At Berkeley, he is teaching a course that challenges students to develop a settler colonial critique of “American Architecture” to recover the contributions of women, sexual minorities, and people of color.