Professor of the Graduate School in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, US, and Honorary Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK

A joint citizen of Canada and the US, Whitney Davis received his PhD in fine arts from Harvard University (Cambridge, US) in 1985, where he was a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows from 1983 to 1986. He was John Evans Professor and director of the Humanities Center at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, US) before joining UC Berkeley in 2001. Davis was Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient Modern Art at UC Berkeley until 2023.

A leading art historian, Davis’ scholarship has vastly contributed to our knowledge of prehistoric and ancient arts, including worldwide rock art, ancient Egyptian and Greco–Roman arts, the Classical tradition in Western art (especially in Britain), and the development of modern art history in relation to archaeology, anthropology and philosophy. Most recently, he has explored analytic models and historical reconstructions of the generation and dissemination of visual culture and of the spatial and temporal resolution at which pictures become visually meaningful.