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
Will Davis is an architectural, urban, and environmental historian whose research focuses on the political economy of plants and multi-species life in the material worlds of architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. This work creates space for new, interdisciplinary collaborations and conversations between architecture, crafts, political ecology, heritage studies, and postcolonial thinking.
Davis leads an SNSF Ambizione 2022 project (690,740 CHF; 2024—2028), a research program that investigates how tactile, plant-based environmental knowledge grounded the architectural history of the plantation system. Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures, engages collaborators and research partners across Europe and Southeast Asia and is hosted by the Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio (USI).
His first book, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture (forthcoming, University of Texas Press, 2026) examines the political ecology of the nypa fruticans palm species through a twentieth century history of architecture, resettlement, and agribusiness. The PhD research on which this book is based was carried out at the University of California, Los Angeles (2015—2021) under the supervision of Professors Dana Cuff (chair), Sylvia Lavin, Ananya Roy, and Michael Osman. The dissertation, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture won the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award for outstanding dissertation in architectural history.
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. He has taught architectural history courses in both architecture and art history departments. In addition to UCLA, these include Princeton University; Occidental College; University of San Diego; National University of Singapore; and Mendrisio (Università della Svizzera italiana).
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).
