Charles L. Davis II

Charles L. Davis II is associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University of Texas at Austin.

He received his Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has an M.Arch and B.P.S. from the University at Buffalo. His academic research excavates the role of racial identity and race thinking in modern architectural history and contemporary design culture. He is Director of the Black Space Project, a research laboratory dedicated to constructing a revisionist historiography of modern architecture that acknowledges the projective role of Black space-making in design culture. His current book project, tentatively entitled Putting Black in Place: A Spatial History of Black Architectural Modernity, recovers the ways that Black social movements have shaped modern architecture from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.

Davis is co-editor of Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (Routledge, 2015), Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), and the forthcoming Rewriting the American Present: New Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Architecture (University of Texas, 2025). His award-winning book, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (University of Pittsburgh, 2019) traces the historical integrations of race and style theory in paradigms of “architectural organicism,” or movements that modeled design on the generative principles of nature. His research has been supported by grants from the Canadian Center for Architecture, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, AIA New York’s Center for Architecture, and the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.