Princeton Mellon / Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies Fellow

Will Davis’s fellowship is made possible by the Mellon Foundation, the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.

Davis is an architectural historian focusing on plants as building materials at the intersection of environmentalism, ethnobotany, and insurgency.

At Princeton, Davis will be working on his first book, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture. His PhD project of the same title was completed at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021, and received the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award for most outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of architectural history completed during the two years prior to the submission date.

Davis is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians IDEAS committee, and an Associate of the Science, Technology and Society research group of the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. He is a contributing editor at ARDETH (Turin, Italy), and a founding member of ANZA East Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania).

In Spring 2023, Davis will offer “Prism of Difference: Architecture, Ecology and the Anti-Colonial,” a class focused on landscapes and dwellings that existed in tenuous relationship to architectural projects of colonial governance. Students will analyze how building materials, whether hewn from living materials or inert, are woven into historical narratives ranging from novellas and poetry to oral histories and painting.