Dr. Will Davis
SNSF Ambizione Group Leader
Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA);
Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP);
Professorship for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments (Prof. Roesler);
Mendrisio, Switzerland
Email: will.davis@usi.ch
Link to: ORCID iD
Will Davis is an architectural, urban, and environmental historian whose research focuses on the politics and entanglements of multi-species life in architectural material worlds, from the nineteenth century to the present. This work creates space for new conversations between architecture, political ecology, and postcolonial thinking.
Davis leads an SNSF Ambizione 2022 project (2024–2028; 690,740 CHF) on the architectural history of plantations called Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures, involving collaborators and research partners across Europe and Southeast Asia. His first book, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture, examines the political ecology of a palm species through a twentieth century history of architecture, resettlement, and agribusiness, and will be published in 2026.
His research has been made possible by numerous grants, including from the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Society of Architectural Historians; National University of Singapore; University of California, Los Angeles; the Mellon Foundation; Gunnar Birkerts Fellowship of the University of Michigan; Urban Humanities Initiative; cityLAB; Design Trust Hong Kong, among others.
Prior to starting his Ambizione project at Mendrisio, Davis was a Princeton Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University (2022–2023), and an Associate of the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.
His PhD was carried out at the University of California, Los Angeles (2015–2021) under the supervision of Profs Dana Cuff (chair), Sylvia Lavin, Ananya Roy, Michael Osman. His dissertation, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture won the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award for outstanding dissertation in architectural history.
Davis is an editor at the Architectural Histories journal of the EAHN, a contributing editor to ARDETH Journal (Turin, Italy), was previously co-chair of the SAH IDEAS Committee (2022–2024), and is a founding member of ANZA East Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania).
